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JOHN LANE COMPANY 
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK 



THE CRIMES OF 
ENGLAND 



BY 

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON 

author oe 
"heretics," "orthodoxy," "all things considered," etc. 



NEW YORK 

JOHN LANE COMPANY 

MCMXVI 



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o> 



Copyright, 1916, 
By John Lane Company 



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Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company, 

New York, U.S.A. 



JAN l\ 1916 

©CU418553 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Some Words to Professor Whirlwind . n 
The German Professor, his need of Edu- 
cation for Debate — Three Mistakes of Ger- 
man Controversialists — The Multiplicity of 
Excuses — Falsehood against Experience — 
Kultur preached by Unkultur — The Mis- 
take about Bernard Shaw — German Lack of 
Welt-Politik — Where England is really 
Wrong. 

CHAPTER II 

The Protestant Hero 27 

Suitable Finale for the German Em- 
peror — Frederick II. and the Power of 
Fear — German Influence in England since 
Luther — Our German Kings and Allies — 
Triumph of Frederick the Great. 

CHAPTER III 

The Enigma of Waterloo .... 45 
How we helped Napoleon — The Revolu- 
tion and the Two Germanies — Religious 

5 



Contents 



Resistance of Austria and Russia — Irre- 
ligious Resistance of Prussia and England — 
Negative Irreligion of England — its Ideal- 
ism in Snobbishness — Positive Irreligion of 
Prussia; no Idealism in Anything — Alle- 
gory and the French Revolution — The Dual 
Personality of England; the Double Bat- 
tle—Triumph of Blucher. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Coming of the Janissaries . . . 6i 
The Sad Story of Lord Salisbury — Ire- 
land and Heligoland — The Young Men of 
Ireland— The Dirty Work— The Use of 
German Mercenaries — The Unholy Alli- 
ance — Triumph of the German Mercenaries. 



CHAPTER V 

The Lost England 77 

Truth about England and Ireland — Mur- 
der and the Two Travellers — Real Defence 
of England — The Lost Revolution — Story 
of Cobbett and the Germans — Historical 
Accuracy of Cobbett — Violence of the Eng- 
lish Language — Exaggerated Truths versus 
Exaggerated Lies — Defeat of the People — 
Triumph of the German Mercenaries. 



Contents 



CHAPTER VI 

nam 

Hamlet and the Danes .... 95 
Degeneration of Grimm's Fairy Tales — 
From Tales of Terror to Tales of Terror- 
ism — German Mistake of being Deep — The 
Germanisation of Shakespeare — Carlyle and 
the Spoilt Child — The Test of Teutonism — 
Hell or Hans Andersen — Causes of Eng- 
lish Inaction — Barbarism and Splendid Iso- 
lation — The Peace of the Plutocrats — Ham- 
let the Englishman — The Triumph of Bis- 
marck. 

CHAPTER VII 

The Midnight of Europe . . . .113 
The Two Napoleons — Their Ultimate 
Success — The Interlude of Sedan — The 
Meaning of an Emperor — The Triumph of 
Versailles — The True Innocence of Eng- 
land — Triumph of the Kaiser. 

CHAPTER VIII 

The Wrong Horse 127 

Lord Salisbury Again — The Influence of 
1870— The Fairy Tale of Teutonism— The 
Adoration of the Crescent — The Reign of 
the Cynics — Last Words to Professor 
Whirlwind. 



Contents 



CHAPTER IX 

»AGB 

The Awakening of England . . * 145 
The March of Montenegro — The Anti- 
Servile State — The Prussian Preparation — 
The Sleep of England — The Awakening of 
England. 

CHAPTER X 

The Battle of the Marne .... 163 
The Hour of Peril— The Human Del- 
uge — The English at the Marne. 



THE CRIMES OF ENGLAND 



I — Some Words to Professor Whirlwind 

Dear Professor Whirlwind, 

YOUR name in the original Ger- 
man is too much for me ; and this 
is the nearest I propose to get to 
it : but under the majestic image 
of pure wind marching in a movement 
wholly circular I seem to see, as in a 
vision, something of your mind. But the 
grand isolation of your thoughts leads you 
to express them in such words as are grati- 
fying to yourself, and have an inconspicu- 
ous or even an unfortunate effect upon 
others. If anything were really to be made 
of your moral campaign against the English 
nation, it was clearly necessary that some- 
body, if it were only an Englishman, should 
show you how to leave off professing phi- 
losophy and begin to practise it. I have 
therefore sold myself into the Prussian serv- 
ice, and in return for a cast-off suit of the 
Emperor's clothes (the uniform of an Eng- 
lish midshipman), a German hausfrau's 
recipe for poison gas, two penny cigars, and 

ii 



12 The Crimes of England 

twenty-five Iron Crosses, I have consented 
to instruct you in the rudiments of interna- 
tional controversy. Of this part of my task 
I have here little to say that is not covered 
by a general adjuration to you to observe 
certain elementary rules. They are, rough- 
ly speaking, as follows : — 

First, stick to one excuse. Thus if a 
tradesman, with whom your social relations 
are slight, should chance to find you toying 
with the coppers in his till, you may possibly 
explain that you are interested in Numis- 
matics and are a Collector of Coins; and he 
may possibly believe you. But if you tell 
him afterwards that you pitied him for be- 
ing overloaded with unwieldy copper discs, 
and were in the act of replacing them by a 
silver sixpence of your own, this further 
explanation, so far from increasing his con- 
fidence in your motives, will (strangely 
enough) actually decrease it. And if you 
are so unwise as to be struck by yet another 
brilliant idea, and tell him that the pennies 
were all bad pennies, which you were con- 
cealing to save him from a police prosecu- 
tion for coining, the tradesman may even 
be so wayward as to institute a police prose- 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 13 

cution himself. Now this is not in any way 
an exaggeration of the way in which you 
have knocked the bottom out of any case you 
may ever conceivably have had in such mat- 
ters as the sinking of the Lusitania. With 
my own eyes I have seen the following ex- 
planations, apparently proceeding from 
your pen, (i) that the ship was a troop-ship 
carrying soldiers from Canada; (ii) that if 
it wasn't, it was a merchant-ship unlawfully 
carrying munitions for the soldiers in 
France; (iii) that, as the passengers on the 
ship had been warned in an advertisement, 
Germany was justified in blowing them to 
the moon; (iv) that there were guns, and 
the ship had to be torpedoed because the 
English captain was just going to fire them 
off; (v) that the English or American au- 
thorities, by throwing the Lusitania at the 
heads of the German commanders, subjected 
them to an insupportable temptation ; which 
was apparently somehow demonstrated or 
intensified by the fact that the ship came up 
to schedule time, there being some mysteri- 
ous principle by which having tea at tea-time 
justifies poisoning the tea; (vi) that the ship 
was not sunk by the Germans at all but by 



14 The Crimes of England 

the English, the English captain having de- 
liberately tried to drown himself and some 
thousand of his own countrymen in order to 
cause an exchange of stiff notes between Mr. 
Wilson and the Kaiser. If this interesting 
story be true, I can only say that such fran- 
tic and suicidal devotion to the most remote 
interests of his country almost earns the cap- 
tain pardon for the crime. But do you not 
see, my dear Professor, that the very rich- 
ness and variety of your inventive genius 
throws a doubt upon each explanation when 
considered in itself? We who read you in 
England reach a condition of mind in which 
it no longer very much matters what ex- 
planation you offer, or whether you offer 
any at all. We are prepared to hear that 
you sank the Lusitania because the sea-born 
sons of England would live more happily 
as deep-sea fishes, or that every person on 
board was coming home to be hanged. You 
have explained yourself so completely, in 
this clear way, to the Italians that they have 
declared war on you, and if you go on ex- 
plaining yourself so clearly to the Ameri- 
cans they may quite possibly do the same. 
Second, when telling such lies as may 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 15 

seem necessary to your international stand- 
ing, do not tell the lies to the people who 
know the truth. Do not tell the Eskimos 
that snow is bright green; nor tell the ne- 
groes in Africa that the sun never shines in 
that Dark Continent. Rather tell the Es- 
kimos that the sun never shines in Africa; 
and then, turning to the tropical Africans, 
see if they will believe that snow is green. 
Similarly, the course indicated for you is to 
slander the Russians to the English and the 
English to the Russians ; and there are hun- 
dreds of good old reliable slanders which 
can still be used against both of them. There 
are probably still Russians who believe that 
every English gentleman puts a rope round 
his wife's neck and sells her in Smithfield. 
There are certainly still Englishmen who 
believe that every Russian gentleman takes a 
rope to his wife's back and whips her every 
day. But these stories, picturesque and use- 
ful as they are, have a limit to their use like 
everything else ; and the limit consists in the 
fact that they are not true, and that there 
necessarily exists a group of persons who 
know they are not true. It is so with mat- 
ters of fact about which you asseverate so 



16 The Crimes of England 

positively to us, as if they were matters of 
opinion. Scarborough might be a fortress; 
but it is not. I happen to know it is not. 
Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally ad- 
mired in England ; but he is not universally 
admired in England. Tell the Russians that 
he is by all means ; but do not tell us. We 
have seen him; we have also seen Scarbor- 
ough. You should think of this before you 
speak. 

Third, don't perpetually boast that you 
are cultured in language which proves that 
you are not. You claim to thrust yourself 
upon everybody on the ground that you are 
stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have 
enough for the whole world. But people 
who have wit enough for the whole world, 
have wit enough for a whole newspaper 
paragraph. And you can seldom get 
through even a whole paragraph without be- 
ing monotonous, or irrelevant, or unintelli- 
gible, or self -contradictory, or broken-mind- 
ed generally. If you have something to teach 
us, teach it to us now. If you propose to 
convert us after you have conquered us, 
why not convert us before you have con- 
quered us? As it is, we cannot believe what 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 17 

you say about your superior education be- 
cause of the way in which you say it. If 
an Englishman says, "I don't make no mis- 
takes in English, not me," we can under- 
stand his remark; but we cannot endorse it. 
To say, "Je parler le Frenche language, non 
demi," is comprehensible, but not convinc- 
ing. And when you say, as you did in a re- 
cent appeal to the Americans, that the Ger- 
manic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of 
"red fluid" in defence of their culture, we 
point out to you that cultured people do not 
employ such a literary style. Or when you 
say that the Belgians were so ignorant as 
to think they were being butchered when 
they weren't, we only wonder whether you 
are so ignorant as to think you are being 
believed when you aren't. Thus, for in- 
stance, when you brag about burning Venice 
to express your contempt for "tourists," we 
cannot think much of the culture, as culture, 
which supposes St. Mark's to be a thing for 
tourists instead of historians. This, how- 
ever, would be the least part of our unfa- 
vourable judgment. That judgment is com- 
plete when we have read such a paragraph 
as this, prominently displayed in a paper in 



18 The Crimes of England 

which you specially spread yourself: "That 
the Italians have a perfect knowledge of the 
fact that this city of antiquities and tourists 
is subject, and rightly subject, to attack and 
bombardment, is proved by the measures 
they took at the beginning of the war to re- 
move some of their greatest art treasures." 
Now culture may or may not include the 
power to admire antiquities, and to restrain 
oneself from the pleasure of breaking them 
like toys. But culture does, presumably, in- 
clude the power to think. For less laborious 
intellects than your own it is generally suf- 
ficient to think once. But if you will think 
twice or twenty times, it cannot but dawn 
on you that there is something wrong in the 
reasoning by which the placing of diamonds 
in a safe proves that they are "rightly sub- 
ject" to a burglar. The incessant assertion 
of such things can do little to spread your 
superior culture; and if you say them too 
often people may even begin to doubt 
whether you have any superior culture after 
all. The earnest friend now advising you 
cannot but grieve at such incautious garrul- 
ity. If you confined yourself to single 
words, uttered at intervals of about a month 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 19 

or so, no one could possibly raise any ra- 
tional objection, or subject them to any ra- 
tional criticism. In time you might come to 
use whole sentences without revealing the 
real state of things. 

Through neglect of these maxims, my 
dear Professor, every one of your attacks 
upon England has gone wide. In pure fact 
they have not touched the spot, which the 
real critics of England know to be a very 
vulnerable spot. We have a real critic of 
England in Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose name 
you parade but apparently cannot spell ; for 
in the paper to which I have referred he is 
called Mr. Bernhard Shaw. Perhaps you 
think he and Bernhardi are the same man. 
But if you quoted Mr. Bernard Shaw's state- 
ment instead of misquoting his name, you 
would find that his criticism of England is 
exactly the opposite of your own; and nat- 
urally, for it is a rational criticism. He does 
not blame England for being against Ger- 
many. He does most definitely blame Eng- 
land for not being sufficiently firmly and em- 
phatically on the side of Russia. He is not 
such a fool as to accuse Sir Edward Grey of 
being a fiendish Machiavelli plotting against 



20 The Crimes of England 

i r 

Germany; he accuses him of being an ami- 
able aristocratic stick who failed to frighten 
the Junkers from their plan of war. Now, 
it is not in the least a question of whether 
we happen to like this quality or that: Mr. 
Shaw, I rather fancy, would dislike such 
verbose compromise more than downright 
plotting. It is simply the fact that English- 
men like Grey are open to Mr. Shaw's attack 
and are not open to yours. It is not true 
that the English were sufficiently clear- 
headed or self -controlled to conspire for the 
destruction of Germany. Any man who 
knows England, any man who hates Eng- 
land as one hates a living thing, will tell you 
it is not true. The English may be snobs, 
they may be plutocrats, they may be hypo- 
crites, but they are not, as a fact, plotters; 
and I gravely doubt whether they could be if 
they wanted to. The mass of the people are 
perfectly incapable of plotting at all, and if 
the small ring of rich people who finance our 
politics were plotting for anything, it was 
for peace at almost any price. Any Lon- 
doner who knows the London streets and 
newspapers as he knows the Nelson column 
or the Inner Circle, knows that there were 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 21 

men in the governing class and in the Cabi- 
net who were literally thirsting to defend 
Germany until Germany, by her own act, be- 
came indefensible. If they said nothing in 
support of the tearing up of the promise of 
peace to Belgium, it is simply because there 
was nothing to be said. 

You were the first people to talk about 
World-Politics; and the first people to dis- 
regard them altogether. Even your foreign 
policy is domestic policy. It does not even 
apply to any people who are not Germans; 
and of your wild guesses about some twenty 
other peoples, not one has gone right even 
by accident. Your two or three shots at my 
own not immaculate land have been such 
that you would have been much nearer the 
truth if you had tried to invade England by 
crossing the Caucasus, or to discover Eng- 
land among the South Sea Islands. With 
your first delusion, that our courage was cal- 
culated and malignant when in truth our 
very corruption was timid and confused, I 
have already dealt. The case is the same 
with your second favourite phrase; that the 
British army is mercenary. You learnt it 
in books and not in battlefields ; and I should 



22 The Crimes of England 



like to be present at a scene in which you 
tried to bribe the most miserable little loafer 
in Hammersmith as if he were a cynical con- 
dottiere selling his spear to some foreign 
city. It is not the fact, my dear sir. You 
have been misinformed. The British Army 
is not at this moment a hireling army any 
more than it is a conscript army. It is a 
volunteer army in the strict sense of the 
word; nor do I object to your calling it an 
amateur army. There is no compulsion, and 
there is next to no pay. It is at this moment 
drawn from every class of the community, 
and there are very few classes which would 
not earn a little more money in their ordi- 
nary trades. It numbers very nearly as 
many men as it would if it were a conscript 
army; that is with the necessary margin of 
men unable to serve or needed to serve other- 
wise. Ours is a country in which that demo- 
cratic spirit which is common to Christen- 
dom is rather unusually sluggish and far be- 
low the surface. And the most genuine and 
purely popular movement that we have had 
since the Chartists has been the enlistment 
for this war. By all means say that such 
vague and sentimental volunteering is value- 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 23 

less in war if you think so; or even if you 
don't think so. By all means say that Ger- 
many is unconquerable and that we cannot 
really kill you. But if you say that we do 
not really want to kill you, you do us an in- 
justice. You do indeed. 

I need not consider the yet crazier things 
that some of you have said ; as that the Eng- 
lish intend to keep Calais and fight France 
as well as Germany for the privilege of pur- 
chasing a frontier and the need to keep a 
conscript army. That, also, is out of books, 
and pretty mouldy old books at that. It 
was said, I suppose, to gain sympathy among 
the French, and is therefore not my imme- 
diate business, as they are eminently capa- 
ble of looking after themselves. I merely 
drop one word in passing, lest you waste 
your powerful intellect on such projects. The 
English may some day forgive you; the 
French never will. You Teutons are too 
light and fickle to understand the Latin seri- 
ousness. My only concern is to point out 
that about England, at least, you are invari- 
ably and miraculously wrong. 

Now speaking seriously, my aear Profes- 
sor, it will not do. It could be easy to fence 



24 The Crimes of England 

with you for ever and parry every point 
you attempt to make, until English people 
began to think there was nothing wrong with 
England at all. But I refuse to play for 
safety in this way. There is a very great 
deal that is really wrong with England, and 
it ought not to be forgotten even in the full 
blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I can- 
not have my countrymen tempted to those 
pleasures of intellectual pride which are the 
result of comparing themselves with you. 
The deep collapse and yawning chasm of 
your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous 
spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are mat- 
ters of fact; but to enumerate them does not 
exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned 
man who rendered the phrase in an English 
advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack you 
to death," was in error ; but to say that many 
such advertisements are vulgar is not an er- 
ror. Again, it is true that the English poor 
are harried and insecure, with insufficient 
instinct for armed revolt, though you will 
be wrong if you say that they are occupied 
literally in shooting the moon. It is true that 
the average Englishman is too much at- 
tracted by aristocratic society; though you 



Some Words to Prof. Whirlwind 25 

will be in error if you quote dining with 
Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In 
more ways than one you forget what is 
meant by idiom. 

I have therefore thought it advisable to 
provide you with a catalogue of the real 
crimes of England; and I have selected them 
on a principle which cannot fail to interest 
and please you. On many occasions we have 
been very wrong indeed. We were very 
wrong indeed when we took part in prevent- 
ing Europe from putting a term to the impi- 
ous piracies of Frederick the Great. We 
were very wrong indeed when we allowed 
the triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with 
the mire and blood of Bluchers sullen sav- 
ages. We were very wrong indeed when we 
allowed the peaceful King of Denmark to 
be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand 
named Bismarck; and when we allowed the 
Prussian swashbucklers to enslave and si- 
lence the French provinces which they could 
neither govern nor persuade. We were very 
wrong indeed when we flung to such hungry 
adventurers a position so important as Heli- 
goland. We were very wrong indeed when 
we praised the soulless Prussian education 



26 The Crimes of England 

and copied the soulless Prussian laws. 
Knowing that you will mingle your tears 
with mine over this record of English 
wrong-doing, I dedicate it to you, and I re- 
main, 

Yours reverently, 

G. K. CHESTERTON 



II — The Protestant Hero 



A QUESTION is current in our 
looser English journalism touch- 
ing what should be done with 
the German Emperor after a 
victory of the Allies. Our more feminine 
advisers incline to the view that he should be 
shot. This is to make a mistake about the 
very nature of hereditary monarchy. As- 
suredly the Emperor William at his worst 
would be entitled to say to his amiable Crown 
Prince what Charles II. said when his 
brother warned him of the plots of assas- 
sins : "They will never kill me to make you 
king." Others, of greater monstrosity of 
mind, have suggested that he should be sent 
to St. Helena. So far as an estimate of his 
historical importance goes, he might as well 
be sent to Mount Calvary. What we have to 
deal with is an elderly, nervous, not unintel- 
ligent person who happens to be a Hohen- 
zollern; and who, to do him justice, does 
think more of the Hohenzollerns as a sacred 
caste than of his own particular place in it. 

37 



28 The Crimes of England 

In such families the old boast and motto of 
hereditary kingship has a horrible and de- 
generate truth. The king never dies; he 
only decays for ever. 

If it were a matter of the smallest im- 
portance what happened to the Emperor 
William when once his house had been dis- 
armed, I should satisfy my fancy with an- 
other picture of his declining years; a con- 
clusion that would be peaceful, humane, har- 
monious, and forgiving. 

In various parts of the lanes and villages 
of South England the pedestrian will come 
upon an old and quiet public-house, deco- 
rated with a dark and faded portrait in a 
cocked hat and the singular inscription, 
"The King of Prussia." These inn signs 
probably commemorate the visit of the Al- 
lies after 1815, though a great part of the 
English middle classes may well have con- 
nected them with the time when Frederick 
II. was earning his title of the Great, along 
with a number of other territorial titles to 
which he had considerably less claim. Sin- 
cere and simple-hearted Dissenting minis- 
ters would dismount before that sign (for 
in those days Dissenters drank beer like 



The Protestant Hero 29 

Christians, and indeed manufactured most 
of it) and would pledge the old valour and 
the old victory of him whom they called the 
Protestant Hero. We should be using every 
word with literal exactitude if we said that 
he was really something devilish like a hero. 
Whether he was a Protestant hero or not 
can be decided best by those who have read 
the correspondence of a writer calling him- 
self Voltaire, who was quite shocked at 
Frederick's utter lack of religion of any 
kind. But the little Dissenter drank his 
beer in all innocence and rode on. And the 
great blasphemer of Potsdam would have 
laughed had he known; it was a jest af- 
ter his own heart. Such was the jest he 
made when he called upon the emperors to 
come to communion, and partake of the 
eucharistic body of Poland. Had he been 
such a Bible reader as the Dissenter doubt- 
less thought him, he might haply have fore- 
seen the vengeance of humanity upon his 
house. He might have known what Poland 
was and was yet to be ; he might have known 
that he ate and drank to his damnation, dis- 
cerning not the body of God. 
Whether the placing of the present Ger- 



30 The Crimes of England 

man Emperor in charge of one of these way- 
side public-houses would be a jest after his 
own heart possibly remains to be seen. But 
it would be much more melodious and fitting 
an end than any of the sublime euthanasias 
which his enemies provide for him. That 
old sign creaking above him as he sat on the 
bench outside his home of exile would be a 
much more genuine memory of the real 
greatness of his race than the modern and 
almost gimcrack stars and garters that were 
pulled in Windsor Chapel. From modern 
knighthood has departed all shadow of chiv- 
alry ; how far we have travelled from it can 
easily be tested by the mere suggestion that 
Sir Thomas Lipton, let us say, should wear 
his lady's sleeve round his hat or should 
watch his armour in the Chapel of St. 
Thomas of Canterbury. The giving and re- 
ceiving of the Garter among despots and 
diplomatists is now only part of that sort of 
pottering mutual politeness which keeps the 
peace in an insecure and insincere state of 
society. But that old blackened wooden sign 
is at least and after all the sign of some- 
thing; the sign of the time when one solitary 
Hohenzollern did not only set fire to fields 



The Protestant Hero 31 

and cities, but did truly set on fire the minds 
of men, even though it were fire from hell. 
Everything was young once, even Fred- 
erick the Great. It was an appropriate pref- 
ace to the terrible epic of Prussia that it 
began with an unnatural tragedy of the loss 
of youth. That blind and narrow savage 
who was the boy's father had just sufficient 
difficulty in stamping out every trace of 
decency in him, to show that some such 
traces must have been there. If the younger 
and greater Frederick ever had a heart, it 
was a broken heart ; broken by the same blow 
that broke his flute. When his only friend 
was executed before his eyes, there were two 
corpses to be borne away; and one to be 
borne on a high war-horse through victory 
after victory: but with a small bottle of poi- 
son in the pocket. It is not irrelevant thus 
to pause upon the high and dark house of his 
childhood. For the peculiar quality which 
marks out Prussian arms and ambitions from 
all others of the kind consists in this wrin- 
kled and premature antiquity. There is 
something comparatively boyish about the 
triumphs of all the other tyrants. There 
was something better than ambition in the 



32 The Crimes of England 

beauty and ardour of the young Napoleon. 
He was at least a lover; and his first cam- 
paign was like a love-story. All that was 
pagan in him worshipped the Republic as 
men worship a woman, and all that was 
Catholic in him understood the paradox of 
Our Lady of Victories. Henry VIIL, a 
far less reputable person, was in his early 
days a good knight of the later and more 
florid school of chivalry; we might almost 
say that he was a fine old English gentleman 
so long as he was young. Even Nero was 
loved in his first days : and there must have 
been some cause to make that Christian 
maiden cast flowers on his dishonourable 
grave. But the spirit of the great Hohen- 
zollern smelt from the first of the charnel. 
He came out to his first victory like one 
broken by defeats; his strength was stripped 
to the bone and fearful as a fleshless resur- 
rection; for the worst of what could come 
had already befallen him. The very con- 
struction of his kingship was built upon the 
destruction of his manhood. He had known 
the final shame ; his soul had surrendered to 
force. He could not redress that wrong; he 
could only repeat it and repay it. He could 



The Protestant Hero 33 

make the souls of his soldiers surrender to 
his gibbet and his whipping-post; he could 
make the souls of the nations surrender to 
his soldiers. He could only break men in as 
he had been broken; while he could break 
in, he could never break out. He could not 
slay in anger, nor even sin with simplicity. 
Thus he stands alone among the conquerors 
of their kind ; his madness was not due to a 
mere misdirection of courage. Before the 
whisper of war had come to him the founda- 
tions of his audacity had been laid in fear. 

Of the work he did in this world there need 
be no considerable debate. It was romantic, 
if it be romantic that the dragon should swal- 
low St. George. He turned a small country 
into a great one : he made a new diplomacy 
by the fulness and far-flung daring of his 
lies: he took away from criminality all re- 
proach of carelessness and incompleteness. 
He achieved an amiable combination of 
thrift and theft. He undoubtedly gave to 
stark plunder something of the solidity of 
property. He protected whatever he stole 
as simpler men protect whatever they have 
earned or inherited. He turned his hollow 
eyes with a sort of loathsome affection upon 



34 The Crimes of England 

the territories which had most reluctantly 
become his: at the end of the Seven Years' 
War men knew as little how he was to be 
turned out of Silesia as they knew why he 
had ever been allowed in it. In Poland, 
like a devil in possession, he tore asunder 
the body he inhabited ; but it was long before 
any man dreamed that such disjected limbs 
could live again. Nor were the effects of 
his break from Christian tradition confined 
to Christendom; Macaulay's world-wide 
generalisation is very true though very 
Macaulayese. But though, in a long view, 
he scattered the seeds of war all over the 
world, his own last days were passed in a 
long and comparatively prosperous peace ; a 
peace which received and perhaps deserved a 
certain praise: a peace with which many 
European peoples were content. For though 
he did not understand justice, he could under- 
stand moderation. He was the most genuine 
and the most wicked of pacifists. He did not 
want any more wars. He had tortured and 
beggared all his neighbours; but he bore 
them no malice for it. 

The immediate cause of that spirited dis- 
aster, the intervention of England on behalf 



The Protestant Hero 35 

of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, 
of course, to the national policy of the first 
William Pitt. He was the kind of man 
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily 
overwhelmed by the obvious. He saw noth- 
ing in a European crisis except a war witH 
France; and nothing in a war with France 
except a repetition of the rather fruitless 
glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He 
was of the Erastian Whigs, sceptical but still 
healthy-minded, and neither good enough 
nor bad enough to understand that even the 
war of that irreligious age was ultimately a 
religious war. He had not a shade of irony 
in his whole being; and beside Frederick, al- 
ready as old as sin, he was like a rather bril- 
liant schoolboy. 

But the direct causes were not the only 
causes, nor the true ones. The true causes 
were connected with the triumph of one of 
the two traditions which had long been 
struggling in England. And it is pathetic to 
record that the foreign tradition was then 
represented by two of the ablest men of that 
age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while 
what was really the old English tradition 
was represented by two of the stupidest men 



36 The Crimes of England 

that mankind ever tolerated in any age, 
George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was the 
figurehead of a group of Tories who set 
about fulfilling the fine if fanciful scheme 
for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bol- 
ingbroke in "The Patriot King." It was 
bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds 
back to what are called domestic affairs, af- 
fairs as domestic as George III. It might 
have arrested the advancing corruption of 
Parliaments and enclosure of country-sides, 
by turning men's minds from the foreign 
glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and 
Chatham; and one of its first acts was to 
terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfor- 
tunately, whatever was picturesque in the 
piracy of Potsdam was beyond the imagina- 
tion of Windsor. But whatever was prosaic 
in Potsdam was already established at Wind- 
sor; the economy of cold mutton, the heavy- 
handed taste in the arts, and the strange 
northern blend of boorishness with etiquette. 
If Bolingbroke's ideas had been applied by 
a spirited person, by a Stuart, for example, 
or even by Queen Elizabeth (who had real 
spirit along with her extraordinary vulgar- 
ity), the national soul might have broken free 



The Protestant Hero 37 

from its new northern chains. But it was 
the irony of the situation that the King to 
whom Tories appealed as a refuge from 
Germanism was himself a German. 

We have thus to refer the origins of 
the German influence in England back to 
the beginning of the Hanoverian Succes- 
sion ; and thence back to the quarrel between 
the King and the lawyers which had issue at 
Naseby ; and thence again to the angry exit 
of Henry VIII. from the mediaeval council 
of Europe. It is easy to exaggerate the part 
played in the matter by that great and hu- 
man, though very pagan person, Martin Lu- 
ther. Henry VIII. was sincere in his hatred 
for the heresies of the German monk, for 
in speculative opinions Henry was wholly 
Catholic; and the two wrote against each 
other innumerable pages, largely consisting 
of terms of abuse, which were pretty well de- 
served on both sides. But Luther was not 
a Lutheran. He was a sign of the break-up 
of Catholicism; but he was not a builder of 
Protestantism. The countries which be- 
came corporately and democratically Protes- 
tant, Scotland, for instance, and Holland, 
followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin 



38 The Crimes of England 

was a Frenchman; an unpleasant French- 
man, it is true, but one full of that French 
capacity for creating official entities which 
can really act, and have a kind of impersonal 
personality, such as the French Monarchy 
or the Terror. Luther was an anarchist, and 
therefore a dreamer. He made that which 
is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and 
most shining manifestation of failure; he 
made a name. Calvin made an active, gov- 
erning, persecuting thing, called the Kirk. 
There is something expressive of him in the 
fact that he called even his work of abstract 
theology "The Institutes. ,, 

In England, however, there were elements 
of chaos more akin to Luther than to Calvin. 
And we may thus explain many things which 
appear rather puzzling in our history, nota- 
bly the victory of Cromwell not only over 
the English Royalists but over the Scotch 
Covenanters. It was the victory of that 
more happy-go-lucky sort of Protestantism, 
which had in it much of aristocracy but 
much also of liberty, over that logical ambi- 
tion of the Kirk which would have made 
Protestantism, if possible, as constructive 
as Catholicism had been. It might be called 



The Protestant Hero 39 

the victory of Individualist Puritanism over 
Socialist Puritanism. It was what Milton 
meant when he said that the new presbyter 
was an exaggeration of the old priest; it was 
his office that acted, and acted very harshly. 
The enemies of the Presbyterians were not 
without a meaning when they called them- 
selves Independents. To this day no one 
can understand Scotland who does not realise 
that it retains much of its mediaeval sympa- 
thy with France, the French equality, the 
French pronunciation of Latin, and, strange 
as it may sound, is in nothing so French as 
in its Presbyterianism. 

In this loose and negative sense only it 
may be said that the great modern mistakes 
of England can be traced to Luther. It is 
true only in this, that both in Germany and 
England a Protestantism softer and less ab- 
stract than Calvinism was found useful to 
the compromises of courtiers and aristo- 
crats; for every abstract creed does some- 
thing for human equality. Lutheranism in 
Germany rapidly became what it is to-day — 
a religion of court chaplains. The reformed 
church in England became something better ; 
it became a profession for the younger sons 



40 The Crimes of England 

of squires. But these parallel tendencies, in 
all their strength and weakness, reached, as 
it were, symbolic culmination when the me- 
diaeval monarchy was extinguished, and the 
English squires gave to what was little more 
than a German squire the damaged and 
diminished crown. 

It must be remembered that the Germanies 
were at that time used as a sort of breeding- 
ground for princes. There is a strange proc- 
ess in history by which things that decay 
turn into the very opposite of themselves. 
Thus in England Puritanism began as the 
hardest of creeds, but has ended as the soft- 
est; soft-hearted and not unfrequently soft- 
headed. Of old the Puritan in war was 
certainly the Puritan at his best ; it was the 
Puritan in peace whom no Christian could 
be expected to stand. Yet those Englishmen 
to-day who claim descent from the great 
militarists of 1649 express the utmost horror 
of militarism. An inversion of an opposite 
kind has taken place in Germany. Out of 
the country that was once valued as provid- 
ing a perpetual supply of kings small enough 
to be stop-gaps, has come the modern men- 
ace of the one great king who would swallow 



The Protestant Hero 41 

the kingdoms of the earth. But the old Ger- 
man kingdoms preserved, and were encour- 
aged to preserve, the good things that go 
with small interests and strict boundaries, 
music, etiquette, a dreamy philosophy, and 
so on. They were small enough to be uni- 
versal. Their outlook could afford to be in 
some degree broad and many-sided. They 
had the impartiality of impotence. All this 
has been utterly reversed, and we find our- 
selves at war with a Germany whose powers 
are the widest and whose outlook is the 
narrowest in the world. 

It is true, of course, that the English 
squires put themselves over the new German 
prince rather than under him. They put the 
crown on him as an extinguisher. It was 
part of the plan that the new-comer, though 
royal, should be almost rustic. Hanover 
must be one of England's possessions and 
not England one of Hanover's. But the fact 
that the court became a German court pre- 
pared the soil, so to speak; English politics 
were already subconsciously committed to 
two centuries of the belittlement of France 
and the gross exaggeration of Germany. 
The period can be symbolically marked out 



42 The Crimes of England 

by Carteret, proud of talking German at the 
beginning of the period, and Lord Haldane, 
proud of talking German at the end of it. 
Culture is already almost beginning to be 
spelt with a k. But all such pacific and only 
slowly growing Teutonism was brought to 
a crisis and a decision when the voice of 
Pitt called us, like a trumpet, to the rescue of 
the Protestant Hero. 

Among all the monarchs of that faithless 
age, the nearest to a man was a woman. 
Maria Theresa of Austria was a German 
of the more generous sort, limited in a do- 
mestic rather than a national sense, firm in 
the ancient faith at which all her own cour- 
tiers were sneering, and as brave as a young 
lioness. Frederick hated her as he hated 
everything German and everything good. 
He sets forth in his own memoirs, with that 
clearness which adds something almost su- 
perhuman to the mysterious vileness of his 
character, how he calculated on her youth, 
her inexperience and her lack of friends as 
proof that she could be despoiled with safety. 
He invaded Silesia in advance of his own 
declaration of war (as if he had run on 
ahead to say it was coming) and this new 



The Protestant Hero 43 

anarchic trick, combined with the corrupti- 
bility of nearly all the other courts, left him 
after the two Silesian wars in possession of 
the stolen goods. But Maria Theresa had 
refused to submit to the immorality of nine 
points of the law. By appeals and conces- 
sions to France, Russia, and other powers, 
she contrived to create something which, 
against the atheist innovator even in that 
atheist age, stood up for an instant like a 
spectre of the Crusades. Had that Crusade 
been universal and whole-hearted, the great 
new precedent of mere force and fraud 
would have been broken ; and the whole ap- 
palling judgment which is fallen upon Chris- 
tendom would have passed us by. But the 
other Crusaders were only half in earnest 
for Europe; Frederick was quite in earnest 
for Prussia; and he sought for allies, by 
whose aid this weak revival of good might be 
stamped out, and his adamantine impudence 
endure for ever. The allies he found were 
the English. It is not pleasant for an Eng- 
lishman to have to write the words. 

This was the first act of the tragedy, and 
with it we may leave Frederick, for we are 
done with the fellow though not with his 



44 The Crimes of England 

work. It is enough to add that if we call all 
his after actions satanic, it is not a term of 
abuse, but of theology. He was a Tempter. 
He dragged the other kings to "partake of 
the body of Poland," and learn the meaning 
of the Black Mass. Poland lay prostrate 
before three giants in armour, and her name 
passed into a synonym for failure. The 
Prussians, with their fine magnanimity, gave 
lectures on the hereditary maladies of the 
man they had murdered. They could not 
conceive of life in those limbs; and the time 
was far off when they should be undeceived. 
In that day five nations were to partake not 
of the body, but of the spirit of Poland; and 
the trumpet of the resurrection of the peo- 
ples should be blown from Warsaw to the 
western isles. 



Ill — The Enigma of Waterloo 

THAT great Englishman Charles 
Fox, who was as national as 
Nelson, went to his death with 
the firm conviction that England 
had made Napoleon. He did not mean, of 
course, that any other Italian gunner would 
have done just as well ; but he did mean that 
by forcing the French back on their guns, 
as it were, we had made their chief gunner 
necessarily their chief citizen. Had the 
French Republic been left alone, it would 
probably have followed the example of most 
other ideal experiments; and praised peace 
along with progress and equality. It would 
almost certainly have eyed with the coldest 
suspicion any adventurer who appeared 
likely to substitute his personality for the 
pure impersonality of the Sovereign People; 
and would have considered it the very flower 
of republican chastity to provide a Brutus 
for such a Caesar. But if it was undesirable 
that equality should be threatened by a citi- 
zen, it was intolerable that it should be simply 

45 



46 The Crimes of England 

forbidden by a foreigner. If France could 
not put up with French soldiers she would 
very soon have to put up with Austrian sol- 
diers; and it would be absurd if, having de- 
cided to rely on soldiering, she had hampered 
the best French soldier even on the ground 
that he was not French. So that whether 
we regard Napoleon as a hero rushing to the 
country's help, or a tyrant profiting by the 
country's extremity, it is equally clear that 
those who made the war made the war-lord ; 
and those who tried to destroy the Republic 
were those who created the Empire. So, at 
least, Fox argued against that much less 
English prig who would have called him 
unpatriotic; and he threw the blame upon 
Pitt's Government for having joined the 
anti-French alliance, and so tipped up the 
scale in favour of a military France. But 
whether he was right or no, he would have 
been the readiest to admit that England was 
not the first to fly at the throat of the young 
Republic. Something in Europe much vaster 
and vaguer had from the first stirred against 
it. What was it then that first made war — 
and made Napoleon ? There is only one pos- 
sible answer : the Germans. 



The Enigma of Waterloo 4*7 

This is the second act of our drama of the 
degradation of England to the level of Ger- 
many. And it has this very important de- 
velopment; that Germany means by this 
time all the Germans, just as it does to-day. 
The savagery of Prussia and the stupidity 
of Austria are now combined. Mercilessness 
and muddleheadedness are met together; 
unrighteousness and unreasonableness have 
kissed each other; and the tempter and the 
tempted are agreed. The great and good 
Maria Theresa was already old. She had a 
son who was a philosopher of the school of 
Frederick; also a daughter who was more 
fortunate, for she was guillotined. It was 
natural, no doubt, that her brother and rela- 
tives should disapprove of the incident; but 
it occurred long after the whole Germanic 
power had been hurled against the new Re- 
public. Louis XVI. himself was still alive 
and nominally ruling when the first pres- 
sure came from Prussia and Austria, de- 
manding that the trend of the French eman- 
cipation should be reversed. It is impossi- 
ble to deny, therefore, that what the united 
Germanies were resolved to destroy was the 
reform and not even the Revolution. The 



48 The Crimes of England 

part which Joseph of Austria played in the 
matter is symbolic. For he was what is called 
an enlightened despot, which is the worst 
kind of despot. He was as irreligious as 
Frederick the Great, but not so disgusting 
or amusing. The old and kindly Austrian 
family, of which Maria Theresa was the af- 
fectionate mother, and Marie Antoinette the 
rather uneducated daughter, was already su- 
perseded and summed up by a rather dried- 
up young man self -schooled to a Prussian 
efficiency. The needle is already veering 
northward. Prussia is already beginning to 
be the captain of the Germanies "in shining 
armour." Austria is already becoming a 
loyal sekundant. 

But there still remains one great difference 
between Austria and Prussia which de- 
veloped more and more as the energy of the 
young Napoleon was driven like a wedge be- 
tween them. The difference can be most 
shortly stated by saying that Austria did, in 
some blundering and barbaric way, care for 
Europe; but Prussia cared for nothing but 
Prussia. Austria is not a nation; you can- 
not really find Austria on the map. But 
Austria is a kind of Empire; a Holy Roman 



The Enigma of Waterloo 49 

Empire that never came, an expanding and 
contracting dream. It does feel itself, in a 
vague patriarchal way, the leader, not of a 
nation, but of nations. It is like some dying 
Emperor of Rome in the decline ; who should 
admit that the legions had been withdrawn 
from Britain or from Parthia, but would 
feel it as fundamentally natural that they 
should have been there, as in Sicily or South- 
ern Gaul. I would not assert that the aged 
Francis Joseph imagines that he is Emperor 
of Scotland or of Denmark; but I should 
guess that he retains some notion that if 
he did rule both the Scots and the Danes, it 
would not be more incongruous than his rul- 
ing both the Hungarians and the Poles. 
This cosmopolitanism of Austria has in it a 
kind of shadow of responsibility for Chris- 
tendom. And it was this that made the dif- 
ference between its proceedings and those of 
the purely selfish adventurer from the north, 
the wild dog of Pomerania. 

It may be believed, as Fox himself came 
at last to believe, that Napoleon in his latest 
years was really an enemy to freedom, in 
the sense that he was an enemy to that very 
special and occidental form of freedom 



50 The Crimes of England 

which we call Nationalism. The resistance 
of the Spaniards, for instance, was certainly 
a popular resistance. It had that peculiar, 
belated, almost secretive strength with 
which war is made by the people. It was 
quite easy for a conqueror to get into Spain ; 
his great difficulty was to get out again. It 
was one of the paradoxes of history that he 
who had turned the mob into an army, in 
defence of its rights against the princes, 
should at last have his army worn down, not 
by princes but by mobs. It is equally cer- 
tain that at the other end of Europe, in burn- 
ing Moscow and on the bridge of the Bere- 
sina, he had found the common soul, even as 
he had found the common sky, his enemy. 
But all this does not affect the first great 
lines of the quarrel, which had begun before 
horsemen in Germanic uniform had waited 
vainly upon the road to Varennes or had 
failed upon the miry slope up to the windmill 
of Valmy. And that duel, on which de- 
pended all that our Europe has since become, 
had great Russia and gallant Spain and our 
own glorious island only as subordinates or 
seconds. That duel, first, last, and for ever, 
was a duel between the Frenchman and the 



The Enigma of Waterloo 51 

German ; that is, between the citizen and the 
barbarian. 

It is not necessary nowadays to defend 
the French Revolution, it is not necessary to 
defend even Napoleon, its child and cham- 
pion, from criticisms in the style of Southey 
and Alison, which even at the time had more 
of the atmosphere of Bath and Cheltenham 
than of Turcoing and Talavera. The French 
Revolution was attacked because it was 
democratic and defended because it was 
democratic ; and Napoleon was not feared as 
the last of the iron despots, but as the first 
of the iron democrats. What France set out 
to prove France has proved ; not that common 
men are all angels, or all diplomatists, or all 
gentlemen (for these inane aristocratic il- 
lusions were no part of the Jacobin theory), 
but that common men can all be citizens and 
can all be soldiers; that common men can 
fight and can rule. There is no need to con- 
fuse the question with any of those esca- 
pades of a floundering modernism which 
have made nonsense of this civic common- 
sense. Some Free Traders have seemed to 
leave a man no country to fight for; some 
Free Lovers seem to leave a man no house- 



52 The Crimes of England 

hold to rule. But these things have not 
established themselves either in France or 
anywhere else. What has been established 
is not Free Trade or Free Love, but Free- 
dom ; and it is nowhere so patriotic or so do- 
mestic as in the country from which it came. 
The poor men of France have not loved the 
land less because they have shared it. Even 
the patricians are patriots ; and if some hon- 
est Royalists or aristocrats are still saying 
that democracy cannot organise and cannot 
obey, they are none the less organised by it 
and obeying it, nobly living or splendidly 
dead for it, along the line from Switzerland 
to the sea. 

But for Austria, and even more for Rus- 
sia, there was this to be said ; that the French 
Republican ideal was incomplete, and that 
they possessed, in a corrupt but still positive 
and often popular sense, what was needed 
to complete it. The Czar was not demo- 
cratic, but he was humanitarian. He was a 
Christian Pacifist; there is something of the 
Tolstoyan in every Russian. It is not wholly 
fanciful to talk of the White Czar: for Rus- 
sia even destruction has a deathly softness 
as of snow. Her ideas are often innocent 



The Enigma of Waterloo 53 

and even childish; like the idea of Peace. 
The phrase Holy Alliance was a beautiful 
truth for the Czar, though only a blasphe- 
mous jest for his rascally allies, Metternich 
and Castlereagh. Austria, though she had 
lately fallen to a somewhat treasonable toy- 
ing with heathens and heretics of Turkey and 
Prussia, still retained something of the old 
Catholic comfort for the soul. Priests still 
bore witness to that mighty mediaeval insti- 
tution which even its enemies concede to be a 
noble nightmare. All their hoary political 
iniquities had not deprived them of that dig- 
nity. If they darkened the sun in heaven, 
they clothed it with the strong colours of sun- 
rise in garment or gloriole ; if they had given 
men stones for bread, the stones were carved 
with kindly faces and fascinating tales. If 
justice counted on their shameful gibbets 
hundreds of the innocent dead, they could 
still say that for them death was more hope- 
ful than life for the heathen. If the new 
daylight discovered their vile tortures, there 
had lingered in the darkness some dim mem- 
ory that they were tortures of Purgatory and 
not, like those which Parisian and Prussian 
diabolists showed shameless in the sunshine, 



54 The Crimes of England 

of naked hell. They claimed a truth not yet 
disentangled from human nature ; for indeed 
earth is not even earth without heaven, as a 
landscape is not a landscape without the sky. 
And in a universe without God there is not 
room enough for a man. 

It may be held, therefore, that there must 
in any case have come a conflict between the 
old world and the new; if only because the 
old are often broad, while the young are al- 
ways narrow. The Church had learnt, not 
at the end but at the beginning of her cen- 
turies, that the funeral of God is always a 
premature burial. If the bugles of Bona- 
parte raised the living populace of the pass- 
ing hour, she could blow that yet more revo- 
lutionary trumpet that shall raise all the 
democracy of the dead. But if we concede 
that collision was inevitable between the new 
Republic on the one hand and Holy Russia 
and the Holy Roman Empire on the other, 
there remain two great European forces 
which, in different attitudes and from very 
different motives, determined the ultimate 
combination. Neither of them had any tinc- 
ture of Catholic mysticism. Neither of them 
had any tincture of Jacobin idealism. Neither 



The Enigma of Waterloo 55 

of them, therefore, had any real moral reason 
for being in the war at all. The first was 
England, and the second was Prussia. 

It is very arguable that England must, in 
any case, have fought to keep her influence 
on the ports of the North Sea. It is quite 
equally arguable that if she had been as 
heartily on the side of the French Revolu- 
tion as she was at last against it, she could 
have claimed the same concessions from the 
other side. It is certain that England had 
no necessary communion with the arms and 
tortures of the Continental tyrannies, and 
that she stood at the parting of the ways. 
England was indeed an aristocracy, but a lib- 
eral one; and the ideas growing in the mid- 
dle classes were those which had already 
made America, and were remaking France. 
The fiercest Jacobins, such as Danton, were 
deep in the liberal literature of England. 
The people had no religion to fight for, as in 
Russia or La Vendee. The parson was no 
longer a priest, and had long been a small 
squire. Already that one great blank in our 
land had made snobbishness the only religion 
of South England; and turned rich men into 
a mythology. The effect can be well summed 



56 The Crimes of England 

up in that decorous abbreviation by which 
our rustics speak of "Lady's Bedstraw," 
where they once spoke of "Our Lady's Bed- 
straw." We have dropped the comparatively 
democratic adjective, and kept the aristo- 
cratic noun. South England is still, as it was 
called in the Middle Ages, a garden; but it 
is the kind where grow the plants called 
"lords and ladies." 

We became more and more insular even 
about our continental conquests; we stood 
upon our island as if on an anchored ship. 
We never thought of Nelson at Naples, but 
only eternally at Trafalgar; and even that 
Spanish name we managed to pronounce 
wrong. But even if we regard the first at- 
tack upon Napoleon as a national necessity, 
the general trend remains true. It only 
changes the tale from a tragedy of choice to 
a tragedy of chance. And the tragedy was 
that, for a second time, we were at one with 
the Germans. 

But if England had nothing to fight for 
but a compromise, Prussia had nothing to 
fight for but a negation. She was and is, 
in the supreme sense, the spirit that denies. 
It is as certain that she was fighting against 



The Enigma of Waterloo 57 

liberty in Napoleon as it is that she was fight- 
ing against religion in Maria Theresa. What 
she was fighting for she would have found 
it quite impossible to tell you. At the best, 
it was for Prussia; if it was anything else, 
it was tyranny. She cringed to Napoleon 
when he beat her, and only joined in the 
chase when braver people had beaten him. 
She professed to restore the Bourbons, and 
tried to rob them while she was restoring 
them. For her own hand she would have 
wrecked the Restoration with the Revolu- 
tion. Alone in all that agony of peoples, she 
had not the star of one solitary ideal to light 
the night of her nihilism. 

The French Revolution has a quality 
which all men feel ; and which may be called 
a sudden antiquity. Its classicalism was not 
altogether a cant. When it had happened it 
seemed to have happened thousands of years 
ago. It spoke in parables; in the hammer- 
ing of spears and the awful cap of Phrygia. 
To some it seemed to pass like a vision ; and 
yet it seemed eternal as a group of statuary. 
One almost thought of its most strenuous 
figures as naked. It is always with a shock 
of comicality that we remember that its date 



58 The Crimes of England 

was so recent that umbrellas were fashion- 
able and top-hats beginning to be tried. And 
it is a curious fact, giving a kind of complete- 
ness to this sense of the thing as something 
that happened outside the world, that its first 
great act of arms and also its last were both 
primarily symbols; and but for this vision- 
ary character, were in a manner vain. It 
began with the taking of the old and almost 
empty prison called the Bastille ; and we al- 
ways think of it as the beginning of the 
Revolution, though the real Revolution did 
not come till some time after. And it ended 
when Wellington and Blucher met in 1815; 
and we always think of it as the end of Na- 
poleon; though Napoleon had really fallen 
before. And the popular imagery is right, 
as it generally is in such things : for the mob 
is an artist, though not a man of science. The 
riot of the 14th of July did not specially 
deliver prisoners inside the Bastille, but it 
did deliver the prisoners outside. Napoleon 
when he returned was indeed a revenant, 
that is, a ghost. But Waterloo was all the 
more final in that it was a spectral resurrec- 
tion and a second death. And in this second 
case there were other elements that were yet 



The Enigma of Waterloo 59 

more strangely symbolic. That doubtful and 
double battle before Waterloo was like the 
dual personality in a dream. It corresponded 
curiously to the double mind of the English- 
man. We connect Quatre Bras with things 
romantically English to the verge of sen- 
timentalism, with Byron and "The Black 
Brunswicker." We naturally sympathise 
with Wellington against Ney. We do not 
sympathise, and even then we did not really 
sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon. 
Germany has complained that we passed over 
lightly the presence of Prussians at the de- 
cisive action. And well we might. Even 
at the time our sentiment was not solely 
jealousy, but very largely shame. Welling- 
ton, the grimmest and even the most unami- 
able of Tories, with no French sympathies 
and not enough human ones, has recorded his 
opinion of his Prussian allies in terms of 
curt disgust. Peel, the primmest and most 
snobbish Tory that ever praised "our gallant 
Allies" in a frigid official speech, could not 
contain himself about the conduct of Blu- 
cher's men. Our middle classes did well to 
adorn their parlours with the picture of the 
"Meeting of Wellington and Blucher." 



60 The Crimes of England 

They should have hung up a companion 
piece of Pilate and Herod shaking hands. 
Then, after that meeting amid the ashes of 
Hougomont, where they dreamed they had 
trodden out the embers of all democracy, the 
Prussians rode on before, doing after their 
kind. After them went that ironical aristo- 
crat out of embittered Ireland, with what 
thoughts we know ; and Blucher, with what 
thoughts we care not; and his soldiers en- 
tered Paris, and stole the sword of Joan of 
Arc. 



IV — The Coming of the Janissaries 

THE late Lord Salisbury, a sad and 
humorous man, made many pub- 
lic and serious remarks that have 
been proved false and perilous, 
and many private and frivolous remarks 
which were valuable and ought to be im- 
mortal. He struck dead the stiff and false 
psychology of "social reform," with its sug- 
gestion that the number of public-houses 
made people drunk, by saying that there 
were a number of bedrooms at Hatfield, but 
they never made him sleepy. Because of this 
it is possible to forgive him for having talked 
about "living and dying nations" : though it 
is of such sayings that living nations die. In 
the same spirit he included the nation of 
Ireland in the "Celtic fringe" upon the west 
of England. It seems sufficient to remark 
that the fringe is considerably broader than 
the garment. But the fearful satire of time 
has very sufficiently avenged the Irish nation 
upon him, largely by the instrumentality of 
another fragment of the British robe which 

61 



62 The Crimes of "England 

he cast away almost contemptuously in the 
North Sea. The name of it is Heligoland; 
and he gave it to the Germans. 

The subsequent history of the two islands 
on either side of England has been suffi- 
ciently ironical. If Lord Salisbury had fore- 
seen exactly what would happen to Heligo- 
land, as well as to Ireland, he might well 
have found no sleep at Hatfield in one bed- 
room or a hundred. In the eastern isle he 
was strengthening a fortress that would one 
day be called upon to destroy us. In the 
western isle he was weakening a fortress that 
would one day be called upon to save us. In 
that day his trusted ally, William Hohen- 
zollern, was to batter our ships and boats 
from the Bight of Heligoland; and in that 
day his old and once-imprisoned enemy, John 
Redmond, was to rise in the hour of English 
jeopardy, and be thanked in thunder for the 
free offer of the Irish sword. All that Rob- 
ert Cecil thought valueless has been our loss, 
and all that he thought feeble our stay. 
Among those of his political class or creed 
who accepted and welcomed the Irish lead- 
er's alliance, there were some who knew the 
real past relations between England and 



The Coming of the Janissaries 63 

Ireland, and some who first felt them in 
that hour. All knew that England could no 
longer be a mere mistress ; many knew that 
she was now in some sense a suppliant. Some 
knew that she deserved to be a suppliant. 
These were they who knew a little of the 
thing called history; and if they thought at 
all of such dead catchwords as the "Celtic 
fringe" for a description of Ireland, it was 
to doubt whether we were worthy to kiss the 
hem of her garment. If there be still any 
Englishman who thinks such language ex- 
travagant, this chapter is written to en- 
lighten him. 

In the last two chapters I have sketched 
in outline the way in which England, partly 
by historical accident, but partly also by 
false philosophy, was drawn into the orbit 
of Germany, the centre of whose circle was 
already at Berlin. I need not recapitulate the 
causes at all fully here. Luther was hardly 
a heresiarch for England, though a hobby 
for Henry VIII. But the negative German- 
ism of the Reformation, its drag towards 
the north, its quarantine against Latin cul- 
ture, was in a sense the beginning of the 
business. It is well represented in two facts ; 



64 The Crimes of England 

the barbaric refusal of the new astronomical 
calendar merely because it was invented by 
a Pope, and the singular decision to pro- 
nounce Latin as if it were something else, 
making it not a dead language but a new lan- 
guage. Later, the part played by particular 
royalties is complex and accidental; "the 
furious German" came and passed; the 
much less interesting Germans came and 
stayed. Their influence was negative but 
not negligible; they kept England out of that 
current of European life into which the Gal- 
lophil Stuarts might have carried her. Only 
one of the Hanoverians was actively Ger- 
man; so German that he actually gloried in 
the name of Briton, and spelt it wrong. In- 
cidentally, he lost America. It is notable 
that all those eminent among the real 
Britons, who spelt it right, respected and 
would parley with the American Revolution, 
however jingo or legitimist they were; the 
romantic conservative Burke, the earth- 
devouring Imperialist Chatham, even, in 
reality, the jog-trot Tory North. The in- 
tractability was in the Elector of Hanover 
more than in the King of England; in the 
narrow and petty German prince who was 



TKe Coming of the Janissaries 65 

bored by Shakespeare and approximately in- 
spired by Handel. What really clinched the 
unlucky companionship of England and 
Germany was the first and second alliance 
with Prussia ; the first in which we prevented 
the hardening tradition of Frederick the 
Great being broken up by the Seven Years' 
War; the second in which we prevented it 
being broken up by the French Revolution 
and Napoleon. In the first we helped Prus- 
sia to escape like a young brigand; in the 
second we helped the brigand to adjudicate 
as a respectable magistrate. Having aided 
his lawlessness, we defended his legitimacy. 
We helped to give the Bourbon prince his 
crown, though our allies the Prussians (in 
their cheery way) tried to pick a few jewels 
out of it before he got it. Through the 
whole of that period, so important in history, 
it must be said that we were to be reckoned 
on for the support of unreformed laws and 
the rule of unwilling subjects. There is, as 
it were, an ugly echo even to the name of 
Nelson in the name of Naples. But whatever 
is to be said of the cause, the work which we 
did in it, with steel and gold, was so able and 
strenuous that an Englishman can still be 



66 The Crimes of England 

proud of it. We never performed a greater 
task than that in which we, in a sense, saved 
Germany, save that in which a hundred years 
later, we have now, in a sense, to destroy 
her. History tends to be a fagade of faded 
picturesqueness for most of those who have 
not specially studied it : a more or less mono- 
chrome background for the drama of their 
own day. To these it may well seem that it 
matters little whether we were on one side 
or the other in a fight in which all the 
figures are antiquated; Bonaparte and 
Blucher are both in old cocked hats ; French 
kings and French regicides are both not 
only dead men but dead foreigners; the 
whole is a tapestry as decorative and as 
arbitrary as the Wars of the Roses. It was 
not so: we fought for something real when 
we fought for the old world against the new. 
If we want to know painfully and precisely 
what it was, we must open an old and sealed 
and very awful door, on a scene which was 
called Ireland, but which then might well 
have been called hell. 

Having chosen our part and made war 
upon the new world, we were soon made to 
understand what such spiritual infanticide 



The Coming of the Janissaries 67 

involved; and were committed to a kind of 
Massacre of the Innocents. In Ireland the 
young world was represented by young men, 
who shared the democratic dream of the 
Continent, and were resolved to foil the plot: 
of Pitt; who was working a huge machine 
of corruption to its utmost to absorb Ireland 
into the An ti- Jacobin scheme of England. 
There was present every coincidence that 
could make the British rulers feel they were 
mere abbots of misrule. The stiff and self- 
conscious figure of Pitt has remained stand- 
ing incongruously purse in hand; while his 
manlier rivals were stretching out their 
hands for the sword, the only possible resort 
of men who cannot be bought and refuse to 
be sold. A rebellion broke out and was re- 
pressed ; and the government that repressed 
it was ten times more lawless than the rebel- 
lion. Fate for once seemed to pick out a 
situation in plain black and white like an 
allegory; a tragedy of appalling platitudes. 
The heroes were really heroes; and the vil- 
lains were nothing but villains. The com- 
mon tangle of life, in which good men do 
evil by mistake and bad men do good by ac- 
cident, seemed suspended for us as for a 



68 The Crimes of England 

■ 

judgment. We had to do things that not 
only were vile, but felt vile. We had to de- 
stroy men who not only were noble, but 
looked noble. They were men like Wolfe 
Tone, a statesman in the grand style who 
was not suffered to found a state ; and Rob- 
ert Emmet, lover of his land and of a woman, 
in whose very appearance men saw some- 
thing of the eagle grace of the young Na- 
poleon. But he was luckier than the young 
Napoleon ; for he has remained young. He 
was hanged; not before he had uttered one of 
those phrases that are the hinges of history. 
He made an epitaph of the refusal of an 
epitaph: and with a gesture has hung his 
tomb in heaven like Mahomet's coffin. 
Against such Irishmen we could only pro- 
duce Castlereagh; one of the few men in 
human records who seem to have been made 
famous solely that they might be infamous. 
He sold his own country, he oppressed ours ; 
for the rest he mixed his metaphors, and has 
saddled two separate and sensible nations 
with the horrible mixed metaphor called the 
Union. Here there is no possible see-saw of 
sympathies as there can be between Brutus 
and Caesar or between Cromwell and Charles 



The Coming of the Janissaries 69 

I. : there is simply nobody who supposes that 
Emmet was out for worldly gain, or that 
Castlereagh was out for anything else. Even 
the incidental resemblances between the two 
sides only served to sharpen the contrast and 
the complete superiority of the nationalists. 
Thus, Castlereagh and Lord Edward Fitz- 
gerald were both aristocrats. But Castle- 
reagh was the corrupt gentleman at the 
Court, Fitzgerald the generous gentleman 
upon the land ; some portion of whose blood, 
along with some portion of his spirit, de- 
scended to that great gentleman, who — in the 
midst of the emetic immoralism of our mod- 
ern politics — gave back that land to the Irish 
peasantry. Thus again, all such eighteenth- 
century aristocrats (like aristocrats almost 
anywhere) stood apart from the popular 
mysticism and the shrines of the poor; they 
were theoretically Protestants, but practical- 
ly pagans. But Tone was the type of pagan 
who refuses to persecute, like Gallio: Pitt 
was the type of pagan who consents to perse- 
cute; and his place is with Pilate. He was 
an intolerant indifferentist ; ready to enfran- 
chise the Papists, but more ready to massa- 
cre them. Thus, once more, the two pagans, 



70 The Crimes of England 

Tone and Castlereagh, found a pagan end 
in suicide. But the circumstances were such 
that any man, of any party, felt that Tone 
had died like Cato and Castlereagh had died 
like Judas. 

The march of Pitt's policy went on; and 
the chasm between light and darkness deep- 
ened. Order was restored; and wherever 
order spread, there spread an anarchy more 
awful than the sun has ever looked on. Tor- 
ture came out of the crypts of the Inquisi- 
tion and walked in the sunlight of the streets 
and fields. A village vicar was slain with 
inconceivable stripes, and his corpse set on 
fire with frightful jests about a roasted 
priest. Rape became a mode of government. 
The violation of virgins became a standing 
order of police. Stamped still with the same 
terrible symbolism, the work of the English 
Government and the English settlers seemed 
to resolve itself into animal atrocities against 
the wives and daughters of a race distin- 
guished for a rare and detached purity, and 
of a religion which makes of innocence the 
Mother of God. In its bodily aspects it 
became like a war of devils upon angels ; as 
if England could produce nothing but tor- 



The Coming of the Janissaries 71 

turers, and Ireland nothing but martyrs. 
Such was a part of the price paid by the 
Irish body and the English soul, for the privi- 
lege of patching up a Prussian after the 
sabre-stroke of Jena. 

But Germany was not merely present in 
the spirit : Germany was present in the flesh. 
Without any desire to underrate the exploits 
of the English or the Orangemen, I can 
safely say that the finest touches were added 
by soldiers trained in a tradition inherited 
from the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, 
and of what the old ballad called "the cruel 
wars of High Germanic" An Irishman I 
know, whose brother is a soldier, and who 
has relatives in many distinguished posts of 
the British army, told me that in his child- 
hood the legend (or rather the truth) of '98 
was so frightfully alive that his own mother 
would not have the word "soldier" spoken in 
her house. Wherever we thus find the tra- 
dition alive we find that the hateful soldier 
means especially the German soldier. When 
the Irish say, as some of them do say, that 
the German mercenary was worse than the 
Orangemen, they say as much as human 
mouth can utter. Beyond that there is noth- 



72 The Crimes of England 

ing but the curse of God, which shall be ut- 
tered in an unknown tongue. 

The practice of using German soldiers, 
and even whole German regiments, in the 
make-up of the British army, came in with 
our German princes, and reappeared on 
many important occasions in our eighteenth- 
century history. They were probably among 
those who encamped triumphantly upon 
Drumossie Moor, and also (which is a more 
gratifying thought) among those who ran 
away with great rapidity at Prestonpans. 
When that very typical German, George III., 
narrow, serious, of a stunted culture and 
coarse in his very domesticity, quarrelled 
with all that was spirited, not only in the 
democracy of America but in the aristocracy 
of England, German troops were very fitted 
to be his ambassadors beyond the Atlantic. 
With their well-drilled formations they fol- 
lowed Burgoyne in that woodland march that 
failed at Saratoga; and with their wooden 
faces beheld our downfall. Their presence 
had long had its effect in various ways. In 
one way, curiously enough, their very mili- 
tarism helped England to be less military; 
and especially to be more mercantile. It be- 



The Coming of the Janissaries 73 

gan to be felt, faintly of course and never 
consciously, that fighting was a thing that 
foreigners had to do. It vaguely increased 
the prestige of the Germans as the military 
people, to the disadvantage of the French, 
whom it was the interest of our vanity to 
underrate. The mere mixture of their uni- 
forms with ours made a background of pa- 
geantry in which it seemed more and more 
natural that English and German potentates 
should salute each other like cousins, and, 
in a sense, live in each other's countries. 
Thus in 1908 the German Emperor was al- 
ready regarded as something of a menace by 
the English politicians, and as nothing but a 
madman by the English people. Yet it did 
not seem in any way disgusting or dangerous 
that Edward VII. should appear upon occa- 
sion in a Prussian uniform. Edward VII. 
was himself a friend to France, and worked 
for the French Alliance. Yet his appearance 
in the red trousers of a French soldier would 
have struck many people as funny ; as funny 
as if he had dressed up as a Chinaman. 

But the German hirelings or allies had 
another character which (by that same strain 
of evil coincidence which we are tracing in 



74 The Crimes of England 

this book) encouraged all that was worst 
in the English conservatism and inequality, 
while discouraging all that was best in it. It 
is true that the ideal Englishman was too 
much of a squire; but it is just to add that 
the ideal squire was a good squire. The best: 
squire I know in fiction is Duke Theseus in 
"The Midsummer Night's Dream/' who is 
kind to his people and proud of his dogs ; and 
would be a perfect human being if he were 
not just a little bit prone to be kind to both 
of them in the same way. But such natural 
and even pagan good-nature is consonant 
with the warm wet woods and comfortable 
clouds of South England; it never had any 
place among the harsh and thrifty squires in 
the plains of East Prussia, the land of the 
East Wind. They were peevish as well as 
proud, and everything they created, but espe- 
cially their army, was made coherent by 
sheer brutality. Discipline was cruel enough 
in all the eighteenth-century armies, created 
long after the decay of any faith or hope 
that could hold men together. But the state 
that was first in Germany was first in feroc- 
ity. Frederick the Great had to forbid his 
English admirers to follow his regiments 



The Coming of the Janissaries 75 

during the campaign, lest they should dis- 
cover that the most enlightened of kings had 
only excluded torture from law to impose it 
without law. This influence, as we have 
seen, left on Ireland a fearful mark which 
will never be effaced. English rule in Ire- 
land had been bad before ; but in the broaden- 
ing light of the revolutionary century I doubt 
whether it could have continued as bad, if we 
had not taken a side that forced us to flatter 
barbarian tyranny in Europe. We should 
hardly have seen such a nightmare as the 
Anglicising of Ireland if we had not already 
seen the Germanising of England. But even 
in England it was not without its effects; 
and one of its effects was to rouse a man who 
is, perhaps, the best English witness to the 
effect on the England of that time of the 
Alliance with Germany. With that man I 
shall deal in the chapter that follows. 



V—The Lost England 



TELLING the truth about Ireland 
is not very pleasant to a patriotic 
Englishman; but it is very pa- 
triotic. It is the truth and noth- 
ing but the truth which I have but touched 
on in the last chapter. Several times, and 
especially at the beginning of this war, we 
narrowly escaped ruin because we neglected 
that truth, and would insist on treating our 
crimes of the '98 and after as very distant; 
while in Irish feeling, and in fact, they are 
very near. Repentance of this remote sort 
is not at all appropriate to the case, and will 
not do. It may be a good thing to forget and 
forgive ; but it is altogether too easy a trick 
to forget and be forgiven. 

The truth about Ireland is simply this: 
that the relations between England and Ire- 
land are the relations between two men who 
have to travel together, one of whom tried to 
stab the other at the last stopping-place or 
to poison the other at the last inn. Conversa- 
tion may be courteous, but it will be occa- 

77 



78 The Crimes of England 

sionally forced. The topic of attempted 
murder, its examples in history and fiction, 
may be tactfully avoided in the sallies ; but it 
will be occasionally present in the thoughts. 
Silences, not devoid of strain, will fall from 
time to time. The partially murdered per- 
son may even think an assault unlikely to 
recur ; but it is asking too much, perhaps, to 
expect him to find it impossible to imagine. 
And even if, as God grant, the predominant 
partner is really sorry for his former man- 
ner of predominating, and proves it in some 
unmistakable manner — as by saving the 
other from robbers at great personal risk — 
the victim may still be unable to repress an 
abstract psychological wonder about when 
his companion first began to feel like that. 
Now this is not in the least an exaggerated 
parable of the position of England towards 
Ireland, not only in '98, but far back from 
the treason that broke the Treaty of Lim- 
erick and far onwards through the Great 
Famine and after. The conduct of the 
English towards the Irish after the Rebel- 
lion was quite simply the conduct of one man 
who traps and binds another, and then calmly 
cuts him about with a knife. The conduct 



The Lost England 79 

during the Famine was quite simply the con- 
duct of the first man if he entertained the 
later moments of the second man, by remark- 
ing in a chatty manner on the very hopeful 
chances of his bleeding to death. The Brit- 
ish Prime Minister publicly refused to stop 
the Famine by the use of English ships. The 
British Prime Minister positively spread the 
Famine, by making the half -starved popula- 
tions of Ireland pay for the starved ones. 
The common verdict of a coroner's jury upon 
some emaciated wretch was "Wilful murder 
by Lord John Russell" : and that verdict was 
not only the verdict of Irish public opinion, 
but is the verdict of history. But there were 
those in influential positions in England who 
were not content with publicly approving the 
act, but publicly proclaimed the motive. The 
Times, which had then a national authority 
and respectability which gave its words a 
weight unknown in modern journalism, 
openly exulted in the prospect of a Golden 
Age when the kind of Irishman native to 
Ireland would be "as rare on the banks of the 
Liffey as a red man on the banks of the Man- 
hattan." It seems sufficiently frantic that 
such a thing should have been said by one 



80 The Crimes of England 

European of another, or even of a Red In- 
dian, if Red Indians had occupied anything 
like the place of the Irish then and since; if 
there were to be a Red Indian Lord Chief 
Justice and a Red Indian Commander-in- 
Chief, if the Red Indian Party in Congress, 
containing first-rate orators and fashionable 
novelists, could have turned Presidents in 
and out ; if half the best troops of the country 
were trained with the tomahawk and half 
the best journalism of the capital written in 
picture-writing, if later, by general consent, 
the Chief known as Pine in the Twilight, 
was the best living poet, or the Chief Thin 
Red Fox, the ablest living dramatist. If that 
were realised, the English critic probably 
would not say anything scornful of red men; 
or certainly would be sorry he said it. But 
the extraordinary avowal does mark what 
was most peculiar in the position. This has 
not been the common case of misgovernment. 
It is not merely that the institutions we set 
up were indefensible; though the curious 
mark of them is that they were literally in- 
defensible; from Wood's Halfpence to the 
Irish Church Establishment. There can be 
no more excuse for the method used by Pitt 



The Lost England 81 

than for the method used by Pigott. But it 
differs further from ordinary misrule in the 
vital matter of its object. The coercion was 
not imposed that the people might live 
quietly, but that the people might die quietly. 
And then we sit in an owlish innocence of 
our sin, and debate whether the Irish might 
conceivably succeed in saving Ireland. We, 
as a matter of fact, have not even failed to 
save Ireland. We have simply failed to de- 
stroy her. 

It is not possible to reverse this judgment 
or to take away a single count from it. Is 
there, then, anything whatever to be said for 
the English in the matter ? There is : though 
the English never by any chance say it. Nor 
do the Irish say it ; though it is in a sense a 
weakness as well as a defence. One would 
think the Irish had reason to say anything 
that can be said against the English ruling 
class, but they have not said, indeed they 
have hardly discovered, one quite simple fact 
— that it rules England. They are right in 
asking that the Irish should have a say in the 
Irish government, but they are quite wrong 
in supposing that the English have any par- 
ticular say in English government. And I 



82 The Crimes of England 

seriously believe I am not deceived by any 
national bias, when I say that the common 
Englishman would be quite incapable of the 
cruelties that were committed in his name. 
But, most important of all, it is the histori- 
cal fact that there was another England, an 
England consisting of common Englishmen, 
which not only certainly would have done 
better, but actually did make some consid- 
erable attempt to do better. If anyone asks 
for the evidence, the answer is that the evi- 
dence has been destroyed, or at least delib- 
erately boycotted: but can be found in the 
unfashionable corners of literature; and, 
when found, is final. If anyone asks for the 
great men of such a potential democratic 
England, the answer is that the great men 
are labelled small men, or not labelled at all ; 
have been successfully belittled as the eman- 
cipation of which they dreamed has dwin- 
dled. The greatest of them is now little more 
than a name; he is criticised to be under- 
rated and not to be understood ; but he pre- 
sented all that alternative and more liberal 
Englishry; and was enormously popular be- 
cause he presented it. In taking him as the 
type of it we may tell most shortly the whole 



The Lost England 83 

of this forgotten tale. And, even when I 
begin to tell it, I find myself in the presence 
of that ubiquitous evil which is the subject 
of this book. It is a fact, and I think it is not 
a coincidence, that in standing for a moment 
where this Englishman stood, I again find 
myself confronted by the German soldier. 

The son of a small Surrey farmer, a re- 
spectable Tory and churchman, ventured to 
plead against certain extraordinary cruelties 
being inflicted on Englishmen whose hands 
were tied, by the whips of German superiors ; 
who were then parading in English fields 
their stiff foreign uniforms and their san- 
guinary foreign discipline. In the countries 
from which they came, of course, such tor- 
ments were the one monotonous means of 
driving men on to perish in the dead dynas- 
tic quarrels of the north; but to poor Will 
Cobbett, in his provincial island, knowing 
little but the low hills and hedges around the 
little church where he now lies buried, the 
incident seemed odd — nay, unpleasing. He 
knew, of course, that there was then flogging 
in the British army also; but the German 
standard was notoriously severe in such 
things, and was something of an acquired 



84 The Crimes of England 

taste. Added to which he had all sorts of 
old grandmotherly prejudices about English- 
men being punished by Englishmen, and no- 
tions of that sort. He protested, not only 
in speech, but actually in print. He was soon 
made to learn the perils of meddling in the 
high politics of the High Dutch militarists. 
The fine feelings of the foreign mercenaries 
were soothed by Cobbett being flung into 
Newgate for two years and beggared by a 
fine of f iooo. That small incident is a small 
transparent picture of the Holy Alliance; of 
what was really meant by a country, once 
half liberalised, taking up the cause of the 
foreign kings. This, and not "The Meeting 
of Wellington and Blucher," should be en- 
graved as the great scene of the war. From 
this intemperate Fenians should learn that 
the Teutonic mercenaries did not confine 
themselves solely to torturing Irishmen. 
They were equally ready to torture English- 
men: for mercenaries are mostly unpreju- 
diced. To Cobbett's eye we were suffering 
from allies exactly as we should suffer from 
invaders. Boney was a bogey; but the Ger- 
man was a nightmare, a thing actually sitting 
on top of us. In Ireland the Alliance meant 



The Lost England 85 

the ruin of anything and everything Irish, 
from the creed of St. Patrick to the mere 
colour green. But in England also it meant 
the ruin of anything and everything Eng- 
lish, from the Habeas Corpus Act to Cob- 
bett. 

After this affair of the scourging, he 
wielded his pen like a scourge until he died. 
This terrible pamphleteer was one of those 
men who exist to prove the distinction be- 
tween a biography and a life. From his 
biographies you will learn that he was a 
Radical who had once been a Tory. From 
his life, if there were one, you would learn 
that he was always a Radical because he was 
always a Tory. Few men changed less; it 
was round him that the politicians like Pitt 
chopped and changed, like fakirs dancing 
round a sacred rock. His secret is buried 
with him ; it is that he really cared about the 
English people. He was conservative be- 
cause he cared for their past, and liberal be- 
cause he cared for their future. But he was 
much more than this. He had two forms of 
moral manhood very rare in our time: he 
was ready to uproot ancient successes, and 
he was ready to defy oncoming doom. Burke 



86 The Crimes of England 

said that few are the partisans of a tyranny 
that has departed : he might have added that 
fewer still are the critics of a tyranny that 
has remained. Burke certainly was not one 
of them. While lashing himself into a 
lunacy against the French Revolution, which 
only very incidentally destroyed the property 
of the rich, he never criticised (to do him 
justice, perhaps never saw) the English 
Revolution, which began with the sack of 
convents, and ended with the fencing in of 
enclosures; a revolution which sweepingly 
and systematically destroyed the property of 
the poor. While rhetorically putting the 
Englishman in a castle, politically he would 
not allow him on a common. Cobbett, a much 
more historical thinker, saw the beginning 
of Capitalism in the Tudor pillage and de- 
plored it; he saw the triumph of Capitalism 
in the industrial cities and defied it. The 
paradox he was maintaining really amounted 
to the assertion that Westminster Abbey is 
rather more national than Welbeck Abbey. 
The same paradox would have led him to 
maintain that a Warwickshire man had more 
reason to be proud of Stratford-on-Avon 
than of Birmingham. He would no more 



The Lost England 87 

have thought of looking for England in 
Birmingham than of looking for Ireland in 
Belfast. 

The prestige of Cobbett's excellent literary 
style has survived the persecution of his 
equally excellent opinions. But that style 
also is underrated through the loss of the 
real English tradition. More cautious 
schools have missed the fact that the very 
genius of the English tongue tends not only 
to vigour, but specially to violence. The 
Englishman of the leading articles is calm, 
moderate, and restrained ; but then the Eng- 
lishman of the leading articles is a Prussian. 
The mere English consonants are full of 
Cobbett. Dr. Johnson was our great man of 
letters when he said "stinks," not when he 
said "putrefaction." Take some common 
phrase like "raining cats and dogs," and note 
not only the extravagance of imagery 
(though that is very Shakespearean), but 
a jagged energy in the very spelling. Say 
"chats" and "chiens" and it is not the same. 
Perhaps the old national genius has survived 
the urban enslavement most spiritedly in our 
comic songs, admired by all men of travel 
and continental culture, by Mr. George 



88 The Crimes of England 

Moore as by Mr. Belloc. One (to which I 
am much attached) had a chorus — 

"O wind from the South 
Blow mud in the mouth 
Of Jane, Jane, Jane." 

Note, again, not only the tremendous vision 
of clinging soils carried skywards in the tor- 
nado, but also the suitability of the mere 
sounds. Say "boue" and "bouche" for mud 
and mouth and it is not the same. Cobbett 
was a wind from the South; and if he occa- 
sionally seemed to stop his enemies' mouths 
with mud, it was the real soil of South Eng- 
land. 

And as his seemingly mad language is 
very literary, so his seemingly mad meaning 
is very historical. Modern people do not 
understand him because they do not under- 
stand the difference between exaggerating 
a truth and exaggerating a lie. He did ex- 
aggerate, but what he knew, not what he did 
not know. He only appears paradoxical be- 
cause he upheld tradition against fashion. A 
paradox is a fantastic thing that is said once : 
a fashion is a more fantastic thing that is 



The Lost England 89 

said a sufficient number of times. I could 
give numberless examples in Cobbett's case, 
but I will give only one. Anyone who finds 
himself full in the central path of Cobbett's 
fury sometimes has something like a physical 
shock. No one who has read "The History 
of the Reformation" will ever forget the 
passage (I forget the precise words) in 
which he says the mere thought of such a 
person as Cranmer makes the brain reel, and, 
for an instant, doubt the goodness of God; 
but that peace and faith flow back into the 
soul when we remember that he was burned 
alive. Now this is extravagant. It takes 
the breath away ; and it was meant to. But 
what I wish to point out is that a much more 
extravagant view of Cranmer was, in Cob- 
bett's day, the accepted view of Cranmer; 
not as a momentary image, but as an im- 
movable historical monument. Thousands 
of parsons and penmen dutifully set down 
Cranmer among the saints and martyrs ; and 
there are many respectable people who would 
do so still. This is not an exaggerated truth, 
but an established lie. Cranmer was not 
such a monstrosity of meanness as Cobbett 
implies ; but he was mean. But there is no 



90 The Crimes of England 

question of his being less saintly than the 
parsonages believed; he was not a saint at 
all ; and not very attractive even as a sinner. 
He was no more a martyr for being burned 
than Crippen for being hanged. 

Cobbett was defeated because the English 
people was defeated. After the frame-break- 
ing riots, men, as men, were beaten: and 
machines, as machines, had beaten them. 
Peterloo was as much the defeat of the Eng- 
lish as Waterloo was the defeat of the 
French. Ireland did not get Home Rule 
because England did not get it. Cobbett 
would not forcibly incorporate Ireland, least 
of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his 
defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; 
his "Register" was what the serial novels of 
Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, 
by the way, inherited the same instinct for 
abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed writing 
"gas and gaiters" more than any two other 
words in his works. But Dickens was nar- 
rower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his 
own, but because in the intervening epoch of 
the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind the 
link with our Christian past had been lost, 



The Lost England 91 

save in the single matter of Christmas, which 
Dickens rescued romantically and by a. 
hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeo- 
man ; that is, a man free and farming a small 
estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed 
as antiquated as bowmen. Cobbett was 
mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every 
way the opposite of what that word means 
to-day. He was as egalitarian as St. Francis, 
and as independent as Robin Hood. Like 
that other yeoman in the ballad, he bore in 
hand a mighty bow; what some of his ene- 
mies would have called a long bow. But 
though he sometimes overshot the mark of 
truth, he never shot away from it, like 
Froude. His account of that sixteenth cen- 
tury in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, 
is not more and not less picturesque than 
Froude's : the difference is in the dull detail 
of truth. That crisis was not the foundling 
of a strong Tudor monarchy, for the mon- 
archy almost immediately perished; it was 
the founding of a strong class holding all 
the capital and land, for it holds them to this 
day. Cobbett would have asked nothing bet- 
ter than to bend his mediaeval bow to the 
cry of "St. George for Merry England," for 



92 The Crimes of England 

though he pointed to the other and uglier 
side of the Waterloo medal, he was patriotic ; 
and his premonitions were rather against 
Blucher than Wellington. But if we take 
that old war-cry as his final word (and he 
would have accepted it) we must note how 
every term in it points away from what the 
modern plutocrats call either progress or 
empire. It involves the invocation of saints, 
the most popular and the most forbidden 
form of medisevalism. The modern Imperi- 
alist no more thinks of St. George in Eng- 
land than he thinks of St. John in St. John's 
Wood. It is nationalist in the narrowest 
sense ; and no one knows the beauty and sim- 
plicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen 
St. George's Cross separate, as it was at 
Cregy or Flodden, and noticed how much 
finer a flag it is than the Union Jack. % And 
the word "merry" bears witness to an Eng- 
land famous for its music and dancing be- 
fore the coming of the Puritans, the last 
traces of which have been stamped out by a 
social discipline utterly un-English. Not 
for two years, but for ten decades Cobbett 
has been in prison ; and his enemy, the "effi- 
cient" foreigner, has walked about in the 



The Lost England 93 

sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men. 
I do not think that even the Prussians ever 
boasted about "Merry Prussia." 



VI — Hamlet and the Danes 



IN the one classic and perfect literary 
product that ever came out of Ger- 
many — I do not mean "Faust," but 
Grimm's Fairy Tales — there is a 
gorgeous story about a boy who went 
through a number of experiences without 
learning how to shudder. In one of them, I 
remember, he was sitting by the fireside and 
a pair of live legs fell down the chimney and 
walked about the room by themselves. After- 
wards the rest fell down and joined up ; but 
this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is 
very charming, and full of the best German 
domesticity. It suggests truly what wild 
adventures the traveller can find by stopping 
at home. But it also illustrates in various 
ways how that great German influence on 
England, which is the matter of these essays, 
began in good things and gradually turned 
to bad. It began as a literary influence, in 
the lurid tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sin- 
tram," and so on; the revisualising of the 
dark background of forest behind our Euro- 

95 



96 The Crimes of England 

pean cities. That old German darkness was 
immeasurably livelier than the new German 
light. The devils of Germany were much 
better than the angels. Look at the Teutonic 
pictures of "The Three Huntsmen" and ob- 
serve that while the wicked huntsman is ef- 
fective in his own way, the good huntsman is 
weak in every way, a sort of sexless woman 
with a face like a teaspoon. But there is 
more in these first forest tales, these homely 
horrors. In the earlier stages they have 
exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy 
does not shudder. They are made fearful 
that he may be fearless, not that he may fear. 
As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric 
dreamland is decent ; and though individuals 
like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it 
with worse things (such as opium), they 
kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole. 
But the one disadvantage of a forest is that 
one may lose one's way in it. And the one 
danger is not that we may meet devils, but 
that we may worship them. In other words, 
the danger is one always associated, by the 
instinct of folk-lore, with forests; it is en- 
chantment, or the fixed loss of oneself in 
some unnatural captivity or spiritual servi- 



Hamlet and the Danes 97 

tude. And in the evolution of Germanism, 
from Hoffmann to Hauptmann, we do see 
this growing tendency to take horror seri- 
ously, which is diabolism. The German be- 
gins to have an eerie abstract sympathy with 
the force and fear he describes, as distinct 
from their objective. The German is no lon- 
ger sympathising with the boy against the 
goblin, but rather with the goblin against the 
boy. There goes with it, as always goes with 
idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness ; the men 
of the forest are already building upon a 
mountain the empty throne of the Super- 
man. Now it is just at this point that I for 
one, and most men who love truth as well as 
tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for 
"going out into the world to seek my for- 
tune," but I do not want to find it — and find 
it is only being chained for ever among the 
frozen figures of the Sieges Allees. I do not 
want to be an idolator, still less an idol. I 
am all for going to fairyland, but I am also 
all for coming back. That is, I will admire, 
but I will not be magnetised, either by mysti- 
cism or militarism. I am all for German 
fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness 
till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales ; 



98 The Crimes of England 

but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, 
I would break it, if I knew what it was. I 
like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful 
boots) to fall down the chimney and walk 
about my room. But when he procures a 
head and begins to talk, I feel a little bored. 
The Germans cannot really be deep be- 
cause they will not consent to be superficial. 
They are bewitched by art, and stare at it, 
and cannot see round it. They will not be- 
lieve that art is a light and slight thing — a 
feather, even if it be from an angelic wing. 
Only the slime is at the bottom of a pool; the 
sky is on the surface. We see this in that 
very typical process, the Germanising of 
Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Ger- 
mans forgetting that Shakespeare was an 
Englishman. I complain of their forgetting 
that Shakespeare was a man; that he had 
moods, that he made mistakes, and, above 
all, that he knew his art was an art and not 
an attribute of deity. That is what is the 
matter with the Germans ; they cannot "ring 
fancy's knell"; their knells have no gaiety. 
The phrase of Hamlet about "holding the 
mirror up to nature" is always quoted by 
such earnest critics as meaning that art is 



Hamlet and the Danes 99 

nothing if not realistic. But it really means 
(or at least its author really thought) that 
art is nothing if not artificial. Realists, like 
other barbarians, really believe the mirror; 
and therefore break the mirror. Also they 
leave out the phrase "as 'twere," which must 
be read into every remark of Shakespeare, 
and especially every remark of Hamlet. 
What I mean by believing the mirror, and 
breaking it, can be recorded in one case I re- 
member; in which a realistic critic quoted 
German authorities to prove that Hamlet had 
a particular psycho-pathological abnor- 
mality, which is admittedly nowhere men- 
tioned in the play. The critic was bewitched ; 
he was thinking of Hamlet as a real man, 
with a background behind him three dimen- 
sions deep — which does not exist in a look- 
ing-glass. "The best in this kind are but 
shadows." No German commentator has 
ever made an adequate note on that. Never- 
theless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; 
he was nowhere more English than in his 
blunders ; but he was nowhere more success- 
ful than in the description of very English 
types of character. And if anything is to 
be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shake- 



100 The Crimes of England 

speare has said about him, I should say that 
Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as 
much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, 
and he had the very grave weaknesses of 
both characters. The chief English fault, 
especially in the nineteenth century, has been 
lack of decision, not only lack of decision in 
action, but lack of the equally essential de- 
cision in thought — which some call dogma. 
And in the politics of the last century, this 
English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a 
great part, or rather refused to play it. 

There were, then, two elements in the Ger- 
man influence; a sort of pretty playing with 
terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism. 
The first pointed to elfland, and the second to 
— shall we say, Prussia. And by that uncon- 
scious symbolism with which all this story 
develops, it was soon to be dramatically 
tested, by a definite political query, whether 
what we really respected was the Teutonic 
fantasy or the Teutonic fear. 

The Germanisation of England, its tran- 
sition and turning-point, was well typified by 
the genius of Carlyle. The original charm 
of Germany had been the charm of the child. 
The Teutons were never so great as when 



Hamlet and the Danes 101 

they were childish ; in their religious art and 
popular imagery the Christ-Child is really a 
child, though the Christ is hardly a man. 
The self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is 
half -redeemed by the unconscious grace 
which called a school not a seed-plot of citi- 
zens, but merely a garden of children. All 
the first and best forest-spirit is infancy, its 
wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent 
fear. Carlyle marks exactly the moment 
when the German child becomes the spoilt 
child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism ; 
and mere mysticism always turns to mere 
immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer 
liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear be- 
comes a philosophy. Panic hardens into 
pessimism; or else, what is often equally de- 
pressing, optimism. 

Carlyle, the most influential English writer 
of that time, marks all this by the mental 
interval between his "French Revolution*' 
and his "Frederick the Great." In both he 
was Germanic. Carlyle was really as senti- 
mental as Goethe ; and Goethe was really as 
sentimental as Werther. Carlyle understood 
everything about the French Revolution, ex- 
cept that it was a French revolution. He 



102 The Crimes of England 

could not conceive that cold anger that comes 
from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to 
him absurd that a man should die, or do 
murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid ; 
should relish an egalitarian state like an equi- 
lateral triangle; or should defend the Pons 
Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber 
bridge. But anyone who does not under- 
stand that does not understand the French 
Revolution — nor, for that matter, the Ameri- 
can Revolution. "We hold these truths to 
be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of 
truism. But though Carlyle had no real re- 
spect for liberty, he had a real reverence for 
anarchy. He admired elemental energy. 
The violence which repelled most men from 
the Revolution was the one thing that at- 
tracted him to it. While a Whig like Macau- 
lay respected the Girondists but deplored the 
Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked 
the Mountain and quite unduly despised the 
Girondists. This appetite for formless force 
belongs, of course, to the forests, to Ger- 
many. But when Carlyle got there, there 
fell upon him a sort of spell which is his 
tragedy and the English tragedy, and, in no 
small degree, the German tragedy too. The 



Hamlet and the Danes 103 

real romance of the Teutons was largely a 
romance of the Southern Teutons, with their 
castles, which are almost literally castles in 
the air, and their river which is walled with 
vineyards and rhymes so naturally to wine. 
But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of 
conquest, he had to prove that the thing 
which conquered in Germany was really 
more poetical than anything else in Germany. 
Now the thing that conquered in Germany 
was about the most prosaic thing of which 
the world ever grew weary. There is a 
great deal more poetry in Brixton than in 
Berlin. Stella said that Swift could write 
charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor 
Carlyle had to write romantically about a 
ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who 
had also a detached taste in the mystical 
grotesques of Germany, but who saw what 
was their enemy : and offered to nail up the 
Prussian eagle like an old crow as a target 
for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic 
essence is not proved by the fact that it did 
not produce poets : it is proved by the more 
deadly fact that it did. The actual written 
poetry of Frederick the Great, for instance, 
was not even German or barbaric, but sim- 



104 The Crimes of England 

ply feeble — and French. Thus Carlyle be- 
came continually gloomier as his fit of the 
blues deepened into Prussian blues ; nor can 
there be any wonder. His philosophy had 
brought out the result that the Prussian was 
the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first 
of men. No wonder he looked at the rest 
of us with little hope. 

But a stronger test was coming both for 
Carlyle and England. Prussia, plodding, 
policing, as materialist as mud, went on 
solidifying and strengthening after uncon- 
quered Russia and unconquered England 
had rescued her where she lay prostrate un- 
der Napoleon. In this interval the two most 
important events were the Polish national 
revival, with which Russia was half inclined 
to be sympathetic, but Prussia was im- 
placably coercionist; and the positive re- 
fusal of the crown of a united Germany by 
the King of Prussia, simply because it was 
constitutionally offered by a free German 
Convention. Prussia did not want to lead 
the Germans : she wanted to conquer the Ger- 
mans. And she wanted to conquer other 
people first. She had already found her bru- 
tal, if humorous, embodiment in Bismarck; 



Hamlet and the Danes 105 

and he began with a scheme full of brutality 
and not without humour. He took up, or 
rather pretended to take up, the claim of 
the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which 
were a quite lawful part of the land of Den- 
mark. In support of this small pretender he 
enlisted two large things, the Germanic 
body called the Bund and the Austrian Em- 
pire. It is possibly needless to say that after 
he had seized the disputed provinces by pure 
Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince 
of Augustenberg, kicked out the German 
Bund, and finally kicked out the Austrian 
Empire too, in the sudden campaign of 
Sadowa. He was a good husband and a 
good father; he did not paint in water col- 
ours ; and of such is the Kingdom of Heaven. 
But the symbolic intensity of the incident 
was this. The Danes expected protection 
from England; and if there had been any 
sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism 
they ought to have had it. They ought to 
have had it even by the pedantries of the 
time, which already talked of Latin inferior- 
ity : and were never weary of explaining that 
the country of Richelieu could not rule and 
the country of Napoleon could not fight. 



106 The Crimes of England 

But if it was necessary for whosoever would 
be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were 
more Teuton than the Prussians. If it be a 
matter of vital importance to be descended 
from Vikings, the Danes really were de- 
scended from Vikings, while the Prussians 
were descended from mongrel Slavonic sav- 
ages. If Protestantism be progress, the 
Danes were Protestant; while they had at- 
tained quite peculiar success and wealth in 
that small ownership and intensive cultiva- 
tion which is very commonly a boast of 
Catholic lands. They had in a quite arresting 
degree what was claimed for the Germanies 
as against Latin revolutionism: quiet free- 
dom, quiet prosperity, a simple love of fields 
and of the sea. But, moreover, by that co- 
incidence which dogs this drama, the English 
of that Victorian epoch had found their 
freshest impression of the northern spirit of 
infancy and wonder in the works of a Dan- 
ish man of genius, whose stories and sketches 
were so popular in England as almost to have 
become English. Good as Grimm's Fairy 
Tales were, they had been collected and not 
created by the modern German ; they were a 
museum of things older than any nation, of 



Hamlet and the Danes 107 

the dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When 
the English romantics wanted to find the 
folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in 
the small country of one of those small kings, 
with whom the folk-tales are almost comi- 
cally crowded. There they found what we 
call an original writer, who was nevertheless 
the image of the origins. They found a 
whole fairyland in one head and under one 
nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the 
English who were then children owe to 
Hans Andersen more than to any of their 
own writers, that essential educational emo- 
tion which feels that domesticity is not dull 
but rather fantastic ; that sense of the fairy- 
land of furniture, and the travel and adven- 
ture of the farmyard. His treatment of in- 
animate things as animate was not a cold 
and awkward allegory: it was a true sense 
of a dumb divinity in things that are. 
Through him a child did feel that the chair 
he sat on was something like a wooden horse. 
Through him children and the happier kind 
of men did feel themselves covered by a roof 
as by the folded wings of some vast domes- 
tic fowl; and feel common doors like great 
mouths that opened to utter welcome. In 



108 The Crimes of England 

the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted 
to England a living bush that can still blos- 
som into candles. And in his tale of "The 
Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of 
romantic militarism against the prigs who 
would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery. 
He suggested, in the true tradition of the 
folk- tales, that the dignity of the fighter is 
not in his largeness but rather in his small- 
ness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helpless- 
ness in the hands of larger and lower things. 
These things, alas, were an allegory. When 
Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, af- 
terwards carried them into France as well as 
Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some 
effort to justify their Germanism, by pit- 
ting what they called the piety and simplicity 
of Germany against what they called the 
cynicism and ribaldry of France. But no- 
body could possibly pretend that Bismarck 
was more pious and simple than Hans An- 
dersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with 
silence or approval while the innocent toy 
kingdom was broken like a toy. Here again, 
it is enormously probable that England 
would have struck upon the right side, if the 
English people had been the English Gov- 



Hamlet and the Danes 109 

ernment. Among other coincidences, the 
Danish princess who had married the Eng- 
lish heir was something very like a fairy 
princess to the English crowd. The national 
poet had hailed her as a daughter of the sea- 
kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the 
most popular royal figure in England. But 
whatever our people may have been like, our 
politicians were on the very tamest level of 
timidity and the fear of force to which they 
have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the 
Danish army and the paper boat of the Dan- 
ish navy, as in the story, were swept away 
down the great gutter, down that colossal 
cloaca that leads to the vast cesspool of Ber- 
lin. 

Why, as a fact, did not England inter- 
pose? There were a great many reasons 
given, but I think they were all various in- 
ferences from one reason; indirect results 
and sometimes quite illogical results, of 
what we have called the Germanisation of 
England. First, the very insularity on which 
we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a 
seat in the central senate of the nations. 
What we called our splendid isolation be- 
came a rather ignominious sleeping-partner- 



110 The Crimes of England 

ship with Prussia. Next, we were largely 
trained in irresponsibility by our contempo- 
rary historians, Freeman and Green, teach- 
ing us to be proud of a possible descent from 
King Arthur's nameless enemies and not 
from King Arthur. King Arthur might not 
be historical, but at least he was legendary. 
Hengist and Horsa were not even legendary, 
for they left no legend. Anybody could see 
what was obligatory on the representative 
of Arthur; he was bound to be chivalrous, 
that is, to be European. But nobody could 
imagine what was obligatory on the repre- 
sentative of Horsa, unless it were to be 
horsy. That was perhaps the only part of 
the Anglo-Saxon programme that the con- 
temporary English really carried out. Then, 
in the very real decline from Cobbett to Cob- 
den (that is, from a broad to a narrow man- 
liness and good sense) there had grown up 
the cult of a very curious kind of peace, to 
be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, 
but by pedlars. Mystics from the beginning 
had made vows of peace — but they added to 
them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty 
were not in the Cobdenite's line. Then, 
again, there was the positive praise of Prus- 



Hamlet and the Danes 111 

sia, to which steadily worsening case the 
Carlyleans were already committed. But 
beyond these, there was something else, a 
spirit which had more infected us as a whole. 
That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We 
gave the grand name of "evolution" to a no- 
tion that things do themselves. Our wealth, 
our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had 
so dazed us that the old Christian England 
haunted us like a ghost in whom we could 
not quite believe. An aristocrat like Palm- 
erston, loving freedom and hating the up- 
start despotism, must have looked on at its 
cold brutality not without that ugly ques- 
tion which Hamlet asked himself — am I a 
coward ? 

It cannot be 
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall 
To make oppression bitter ; or 'ere this 
I should have fatted all the region kites 
With this slave's offal. 

We made dumb our anger and our honour; 
but it has not brought us peace. 



VII — The Midnight of Europe 

AMONG the minor crimes of Eng- 
land may be classed the shallow 
criticism and easy abandonment 
of Napoleon III. The Victorian 
English had a very bad habit of being in- 
fluenced by words and at the same time pre- 
tending to despise them. They would build 
their whole historical philosophy upon two 
or three titles, and then refuse to get even 
the titles right. The solid Victorian Eng- 
lishman, with his whiskers and his Parlia- 
mentary vote, was quite content to say that 
Louis Napoleon and William of Prussia both 
became Emperors — by which he meant auto- 
crats. His whiskers would have bristled 
with rage and he would have stormed at you 
for hair-splitting and "lingo," if you had 
answered that William was German Em- 
peror, while Napoleon was not French Em- 
peror, but only Emperor of the French. 
What could such mere order of the words 
matter ? Yet the same Victorian would have 
been even more indignant if he had been 

"3 



114 The Crimes of England 

asked to be satisfied with an Art Master, 
when he had advertised for a Master of Arts. 
His irritation would have increased if the 
Art Master had promised him a sea-piece 
and had brought him a piece of the sea ; or if, 
during the decoration of his house, the same 
aesthetic humourist had undertaken to pro- 
cure some Indian Red and had produced a 
Red Indian. 

The Englishman would not see that if 
there was only a verbal difference between 
the French Emperor and the Emperor of the 
French, so, if it came to that, it was a verbal 
difference between the Emperor and the Re- 
public, or even between a Parliament and no 
Parliament. For him an Emperor meant 
merely despotism; he had not yet learned 
that a Parliament may mean merely oligar- 
chy. He did not know that the English 
people would soon be made impotent, not by 
the disfranchising of their constituents, but 
simply by the silencing of their members; 
and that the governing class of England did 
not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but 
upon rotten representatives. Therefore he 
did not understand Bonapartism. He did 
not understand that French democracy be- 



The Mi&night of Europe 115 

came more democratic, not less, when it 
turned all France into one constituency 
which elected one member. He did not un- 
derstand that many dragged down the Re- 
public because it was not republican, but 
purely senatorial. He was yet to learn how 
quite corruptly senatorial a great represen- 
tative assembly can become. Yet in Eng- 
land to-day we hear "the decline of Parlia- 
ment" talked about and taken for granted 
by the best Parliamentarians — Mr. Balfour, 
for instance — and we hear the one partly 
French and wholly Jacobin historian of the 
French Revolution recommending for the 
English evil a revival of the power of the 
Crown. It seems that so far from having 
left Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey 
dust of the dead despotisms, it is not at all 
improbable that our most extreme revolu- 
tionary developments may end where Louis 
Napoleon began. 

In other words, the Victorian Englishman 
did not understand the words "Emperor of 
the French." The type of title was deliber- 
ately chosen to express the idea of an elec- 
tive and popular origin; as against such a 
phrase as "the German Emperor," which ex- 



116 The Crimes of England 

presses an almost transcendental tribal pa- 
triarchate, or such a phrase as "King of 
Prussia," which suggests personal owner- 
ship of a whole territory. To treat the Coup 
d'etat as unpardonable is to justify riot 
against despotism, but forbid any riot 
against aristocracy. Yet the idea expressed 
in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead, 
but rather risen from the dead. It is the 
idea that while a government may pretend 
to be a popular government, only a person 
can be really popular. Indeed, the idea is 
still the crown of American democracy, as 
it was for a time the crown of French de- 
mocracy. The very powerful official who 
makes the choice of that great people for 
peace or war, might very well be called, not 
the President of the United States, but the 
President of the Americans. In Italy we 
have seen the King and the mob prevail over 
the conservatism of the Parliament, and in 
Russia the new popular policy sacramentally 
symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of 
the new armies. But in one place, at least, 
the actual form of words exists; and the 
actual form of words has been splendidly 
justified. One man among the sons of men 



The Midnight of Europe 117 

has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula 
with awful and disastrous fidelity. Political 
and geographical ruin have written one last 
royal title across the sky; the loss of palace 
and capital and territory have but isolated 
and made evident the people that has not 
been lost; not laws but the love of exiles, not 
soil but the souls of men, still make certain 
that five true words shall yet be written in 
the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of man- 
kind: "The King of the Belgians." 

It is a common phrase, recurring con- 
stantly in the real if rabid eloquence of Vic- 
tor Hugo, that Napoleon III. was a mere ape 
of Napoleon I. That is, that he had, as the 
politician says, in "L'Aiglon," "le petit cha- 
peau, mais pas la tete"; that he was merely 
a bad imitation. This is extravagantly ex- 
aggerative ; and those who say it, moreover, 
often miss the two or three points of re- 
semblance which really exist in the exagger- 
ation. One resemblance there certainly was. 
In both Napoleons it has been suggested that 
the glory was not so great as it seemed ; but 
in both it can be emphatically added that the 
eclipse was not so great as it seemed either. 
Both succeeded at first and failed at last. 



118 The Crimes of England 

But both succeeded at last, even after the 
failure. If at this moment we owe thanks to 
Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of 
united France, we also owe some thanks to 
Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united 
Italy. That great movement to a freer and 
more chivalrous Europe which we call to- 
day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerun- 
ners and first victories before our time; and 
it not only won at Areola, but also at Sol- 
ferino. Men who remembered Louis Na- 
poleon when he mooned about the Blessing- 
ton salon, and was supposed to be almost 
mentally deficient, used to say he deceived 
Europe twice ; once when he made men think 
him an imbecile, and once when he made 
them think him a statesman. But he de- 
ceived them a third time; when he made 
them think he was dead ; and had done noth- 
ing. 

In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo 
and the even more unbridled prose of King- 
lake, Napoleon III. is really and solely dis- 
credited in history because of the catastro- 
phe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of 
lightning on Louis Napoleon ; but he threw 
very little light on him. Some passages in 



The Midnight of Europe 119 

the "Chatiments" are really caricatures 
carved in eternal marble. They will always 
be valuable in reminding generations too 
vague and soft, as were the Victorians, of 
the great truth that hatred is beautiful, when 
it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But 
most of them could have been written about 
Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John, or 
Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor 
Louis Napoleon; they bear no trace of any 
comprehension of his quite interesting aims, 
and his quite comprehensible contempt for 
the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And if 
a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do 
justice to the revolutionary element in 
Caesarism, it need hardly be said that a 
rather Primrose League Tory like Tennyson 
did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid insist- 
ence upon the Coup d'etat is, I fear, only an 
indulgence in one of the least pleasing pleas- 
ures of our national pen and press, and one 
which afterwards altogether ran away with 
us over the Dreyfus case. It is an unfor- 
tunate habit of publicly repenting for other 
people's sins. If this came easy to an Eng- 
lishman like Kinglake, it came, of course, 
still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's 



120 The Crimes of England 

husband and even to Queen Victoria herself, 
who was naturally influenced by him. But 
in so far as the sensible masses of the Eng- 
lish nation took any interest in the matter, it 
is probable that they sympathised with Palm- 
erston, who was as popular as the Prince 
Consort was unpopular. The black mark 
against Louis Napoleon's name until now, 
has simply been Sedan ; and it is our whole 
purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an inter- 
lude. If it is not an interlude, it will be the 
end of the world. But we have sworn to 
make an end of that ending: warring on 
until, if only by a purgatory of the nations 
and the mountainous annihilation of men, 
the story of the world ends well. 

There are, as it were, valleys of history 
quite close to us, but hidden by the closer 
hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold 
in the soft Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps 
with his still-born English Revolution. An- 
other is under that height called The Spy of 
Italy, where a new Napoleon brought back 
the golden eagles against the black eagles of 
Austria. Yet that French adventure in sup- 
port of the Italian insurrection was very im- 
portant; we are only beginning to under- 



The Midmght of Europe 121 

stand its importance. It was a defiance to 
the German Reaction and 1870 was a sort 
of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory 
was a defiance to the German Reaction and 
1 9 14 was the attempted revenge for it. It is 
true that the French liberation of Italy was 
incomplete, the problem of the Papal States, 
for instance, being untouched by the Peace 
of Villafranca. The volcanic out fruitful 
spirit of Italy had already produced that 
wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipres- 
ent personality whose red shirt was to be a 
walking flag : Garibaldi. And many English 
Liberals sympathised with him and his ex- 
tremists as against the peace. Palmerston 
called it "the peace that passeth all under- 
standing" : but the profanity of that hilari- 
ous old heathen was nearer the mark than he 
knew: there were really present some of 
those deep things which he did not under- 
stand. To quarrel with the Pope, but to 
compromise with him, was an instinct with 
the Bonapartes ; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon 
could be expected to understand. They knew 
the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is not a 
Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood. 
And after all the English Liberals could not 



122 The Crimes of England 

get their own Government to risk what the 
French Government had risked; and Napo- 
leon III. might well have retorted on Palm- 
erston, his rival in international Liberalism, 
that half a war was better than no fighting. 
Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt 
before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic im- 
patience for the time when the world 

"Shall ring to the roar of the lion 
Proclaiming Republican Rome." 

But he might have remembered, after all, 
that it was not the British lion, that a Brit- 
ish poet should have the right to say so im- 
periously, "Let him roar again. Let him 
roar again." 

It is true that there was no clear call to 
England from Italy, as there certainly was 
from Denmark. The great powers were not 
bound to help Italy to become a nation, as 
they were bound to support the unquestioned 
fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the 
great Italian patriot was to experience both 
extremes of the English paradox, and, curi- 
ously enough, in connection with both the 
two national and anti-German causes. For 



The Midnight of Europe 123 



Italy he gained the support of the English, 
but not the support of England. Not a few 
of our countrymen followed the red shirt; 
but not in the red coat. And when he came 
to England, not to plead the cause of Italy 
but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found 
he was more popular with the English than 
any Englishman. He made his way through 
a forest of salutations, which would will- 
ingly have turned itself into a forest of 
swords. But those who kept the sword kept 
it sheathed. For the ruling class the val- 
our of the Italian hero, like the beauty of 
the Danish Princess, was a thing to be ad- 
mired, that is enjoyed, like a novel — or a 
newspaper. Palmerston was the very type 
of Pacifism, because he was the very type of 
Jingoism. In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, 
he was in practice as cautious as Cobden. 
England had the most prudent aristocracy, 
but the most reckless democracy in the 
world. It was, and is, the English contra- 
diction, which has so much misrepresented 
us, especially to the Irish. Our national cap- 
tains were carpet knights; our knights er- 
rant were among the dismounted rabble. 
When an Austrian general who had flogged 



124 The Crimes of England 

women in the conquered provinces appeared 
in the London streets, some common dray- 
men off a cart behaved with the direct quix- 
otry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad. He 
had beaten women and they beat him. They 
regarded themselves simply as avengers of 
ladies in distress, breaking the bloody whip 
of a German bully; just as Cobbett had 
sought to break it when it was wielded over 
the men of England. The boorishness was 
in the Germanic or half -Germanic rulers 
who wore crosses and spurs: the gallantry 
was in the gutter. English draymen had 
more chivalry than Teuton aristocrats — or 
English ones. 

I have dwelt a little on this Italian experi- 
ment because it lights up Louis Napoleon as 
what he really was before the eclipse, a poli- 
tician — perhaps an unscrupulous politician 
— but certainly a democratic politician. A 
power seldom falls being wholly faultless; 
and it is true that the Second Empire became 
contaminated with cosmopolitan spies and 
swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats 
as Rochefort as well as Hugo. But there 
was no French inefficiency that weighed a 
hair in the balance compared with the huge 



The Midnight of Europe 125 

and hostile efficiency of Prussia; the tall ma- 
chine that had struck down Denmark and 
Austria, and now stood ready to strike 
again, extinguishing the lamp of the world. 
There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, 
and Bismarck adjusted it, as with his ringer, 
by a forgery — for he had many minor ac- 
complishments. France fell: and what fell 
with her was freedom, and what reigned in 
her stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. 
The crowning of the first modern Kaiser in 
the very palace of the old French kings was 
an allegory; like an allegory on those Ver- 
sailles walls. For it was at once the lifting 
of the old despotic diadem and its descent 
on the low brow of a barbarian. Louis XI. 
had returned, and not Louis IX.; and 
Europe was to know that sceptre on which 
there is no dove. 

The instant evidence that Europe was in 
the grip of the savage was as simple as it 
was sinister. The invaders behaved with an 
innocent impiety and bestiality that had 
never been known in those lands since Clovis 
was signed with the cross. To the naked 
pride of the new men nations simply were 
not The struggling populations of two vast 



126 The Crimes of England 

provinces were simply carried away like 
slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of 
some prehistoric town. France was fined 
for having pretended to be a nation; and 
the fine was planned to ruin her forever. 
Under the pressure of such impossible injus- 
tice Prance cried out to the Christian na- 
tions, one after another, and by name. Her 
last cry ended in a stillness like that which 
had encircled Denmark. 

One man answered; one who had quar- 
relled with the French and their Emperor; 
but who knew it was not an emperor that 
had fallen. Garibaldi, not always wise but 
to his end a hero, took his station, sword in 
hand, under the darkening sky of Christen- 
dom, and shared the last fate of France. 
A curious record remains, in which a Ger- 
man commander testifies to the energy and 
effect of the last strokes of the wounded 
lion of Aspromonte. But England went 
away sorrowful, for she had great posses- 
sions. 



VIII — The Wrong Horse 



IN another chapter I mentioned some of 
the late Lord Salisbury's remarks with 
regret, but I trust with respect; for 
in certain matters he deserved all the 
respect that can be given to him. His crit- 
ics said that he "thought aloud"; which is 
perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of 
a man. He was jeered at for it by journal- 
ists and politicians who had not the capacity 
to think or the courage to tell their thoughts. 
And he had one yet finer quality which re- 
deems a hundred lapses of anarchic cyni- 
cism. He could change his mind upon the 
platform: he could repent in public. He 
could not only think aloud ; he could "think 
better" aloud. And one of the turning- 
points of Europe had come in the hour when 
he avowed his conversion from the un-Chris- 
tian and un-European policy into which his 
dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had 
dragged him ; and declared that England had 
"put her money on the wrong horse." When 
he said it, he referred to the backing we gave 

127 



128 TJie Crimes of England 

to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Rus- 
sia. But I cannot but think that if he had 
lived much longer, he would have come to 
feel the same disgust for his long diplomatic 
support of the Turk's great ally in the North. 
He did not live, as we have lived, to feel that 
horse run away with us, and rush on 
through wilder and wilder places, until we 
knew that we were riding on the nightmare. 

What was this thing to which we trusted? 
And how may we most quickly explain its de- 
velopment from a dream to a nightmare, and 
the hair's-breadth escape by which it did not 
hurl us to destruction, as it seems to be hurl- 
ing the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and 
we must not ask for too logical a definition 
of it, for the people whom it possesses dis- 
own logic; and the whole thing is not so 
much a theory as a confusion of thought. 
Its widest and most elementary character is 
adumbrated in the word Teutonism or Pan- 
Germanism; and with this (which was what 
appeared to win in 1870) we had better be- 
gin. The nature of Pan-Germanism may 
be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat 
thus: 

The horse asserts that all other creatures 



The Wrong Horse 129 

are morally bound to sacrifice their inter- 
ests to his, on the specific ground that he pos- 
sesses all noble and necessary qualities, and 
is an end in himself. It is pointed out in an- 
swer that when climbing a tree the horse is 
less graceful than the cat; that lovers and 
poets seldom urge the horse to make a noise 
all night like the nightingale ; that when sub- 
merged for some long time under water, he 
is less happy than the haddock; and that 
when he is cut open pearls are less often 
found in him than in an oyster. He is not 
content to answer (though, being a muddle- 
headed horse, he does use this answer also) 
that having an undivided hoof is more than 
pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. 
He reflects for a few years on the subject 
of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the 
characteristic equine quality of caudality, or 
a tail" ; so that cats are horses, and wave on 
every tree-top the tail which is the equine 
banner. Nightingales are found to have 
legs, which explains their power of song. 
Haddocks are vertebrates ; and therefore are 
sea-horses. And though the oyster out- 
wardly presents dissimilarities which seem 
to divide him from the horse, he is by the 



130 The Crimes of England 

all-filling nature-might of the same horse- 
moving energy sustained. 

Now this horse is intellectually the wrong 
horse. It is not perhaps going too far to say 
that this horse is a donkey. For it is ob- 
viously within even the intellectual resources 
of a haddock to answer, "But if a haddock 
is a horse, why should I yield to you any 
more than you to me? Why should that 
singing horse commonly called the nightin- 
gale, or that climbing horse hitherto known 
as the cat, fall down and worship you be- 
cause of your horsehood? If all our native 
faculties are the accomplishments of a horse 
— why then you are only another horse with- 
out any accomplishments." When thus 
gently reasoned with, the horse flings up his 
heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats 
the haddock and pursues the nightingale, and 
that is how the war began. 

This apologue is not in the least more 
fantastic than the facts of the Teutonic 
claim. The Germans do really say that Eng- 
lishmen are only Sea-Germans, as our had- 
docks were only sea-horses. They do really 
say that the nightingales of Tuscany or the 
pearls of Hellas must somehow be German 



The Wrong Horse 131 

birds or German jewels. They do maintain 
that the Italian Renaissance was really the 
German Renaissance, pure Germans having 
Italian names when they were painters, as 
cockneys sometimes have when they are 
hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and 
the great Jews were Teutonic. One Teuton- 
ist I read actually explained the fresh en- 
ergy of the French Revolution and the stale 
privileges of its German enemies by saying 
that the Germanic soul awoke in France and 
attacked the Latin influence in Germany. 
On the advantages of this method I need not 
dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson 
knocking out an English prize-fighter, you 
have only to say that it was the whiteness of 
the black man that won and the blackness of 
the white man that was beaten. But about 
the Italian Renaissance they are less general 
and will go into detail. They will discover 
(in their researches into 'istry, as Mr. Gan- 
dish said) that Michael Angelo's surname 
was Buonarotti ; and they will point out that 
the word "roth" is very like the word "rot." 
Which, in one sense, is true enough. Most 
Englishmen will be content to say it is all 
rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with 



132 The Crimes of England 

the preposterous Prussian history, which 
talks, for instance, about the "perfect re- 
ligious tolerance of the Goths" ; which is like 
talking about the legal impartiality of chick- 
en-pox. He will decline to believe that the 
Jews were Germans ; though he may perhaps 
have met some Germans who were Jews. 
But deeper than any such practical reply, lies 
the deep inconsistency of the parable. It is 
simply this; that if Teutonism be used for 
comprehension it cannot be used for con- 
quest. If all intelligent peoples are Ger- 
mans, then Prussians are only the least in- 
telligent Germans. If the men of Flanders 
are as German as the men of Frankfort, we 
can only say that in saving Belgium we are 
helping the Germans who are in the right 
against the Germans who are in the wrong. 
Thus in Alsace the conquerors are forced 
into the comic posture of annexing the peo- 
ple for being German and then persecuting 
them for being French. The French Teu- 
tons who built Rheims must surrender it to 
the South German Teutons who have partly 
built Cologne; and these in turn surrender 
Cologne to the North German Teutons, who 
never built anything, except the wooden 



The Wrong Horse 133 

Aunt Sally of old Hindenburg. Every Teu- 
ton must fall on his face before an inferior 
Teuton; until they all find, in the foul 
marshes towards the Baltic, the very lowest 
of all possible Teutons, and worship him — 
and find he is a Slav. So much for Pan- 
Germanism. 

But though Teutonism is indefinable, or 
at least is by the Teutons undefined, it is not 
unreal. A vague but genuine soul does pos- 
sess all peoples who boast of Teutonism; 
and has possessed ourselves, in so far as we 
have been touched by that folly. Not a race, 
but rather a religion, the thing exists; and 
in 1870 its sun was at noon. We can most 
briefly describe it under three heads. 

The victory of the German arms meant 
before Leipzic, and means now, the over- 
throw of a certain idea. That idea is the 
idea of the Citizen. This is true in a quite 
abstract and courteous sense; and is not 
meant as a loose charge of oppression. Its 
truth is quite compatible with a view that 
the Germans are better governed than the 
French. In many ways the Germans are 
very well governed. But they might be gov- 
erned ten thousand times better than they 



134 The Crimes of England 

are, or than anybody ever can be, and still 
be as far as ever from governing. The idea 
of the Citizen is that his individual human 
nature shall be constantly and creatively ac- 
tive in altering the State. The Germans are 
right in regarding the idea as dangerously 
revolutionary. Every Citizen is a revolu- 
tion. That is, he destroys, devours and 
adapts his environment to the extent of his 
own thought and conscience. This is what 
separates the human social effort from the 
non-human ; the bee creates the honey-comb, 
but he does not criticise it. The German 
ruler really does feed and train the Ger- 
man as carefully as a gardener waters a 
flower. But if the flower suddenly began to 
water the gardener, he would be much sur- 
prised. So in Germany the people really are 
educated ; but in France the people educates. 
The French not only make up the State, but 
make the State; not only make it, but re- 
make it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, 
always painting the happy German like a 
portrait ; in France the Frenchman is the ar- 
tist, always painting and repainting France 
like a house. No state of social good that 
does not mean the Citizen choosing good, as 



The Wrong Horse 135 

well as getting it, has the idea of the Citizen 
at all. To say the Germanies are naturally 
at war with this idea is merely to respect 
them and take them seriously: otherwise 
their war on the French Revolution would 
be only an ignorant feud. It is this, to them, 
risky and fanciful notion of the critical and 
creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate 
under United Germany — under the undi- 
vided hoof. 

Nevertheless, when the German says he 
has or loves freedom, what he says is not 
false. He means something; and what 
he means is the second principle, which I 
may summarise as the Irresponsibility of 
Thought. Within the iron framework of 
the fixed State, the German has not only lib- 
erty but anarchy. Anything can be said al- 
though, or rather because, nothing can be 
done. Philosophy is really free. But this 
practically means only that the prisoner's cell 
has become the madman's cell: that it is 
scrawled all over inside with stars and sys- 
tems, so that it looks like eternity. This is 
the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, 
in his brilliant book, between the wildness of 
German theory and the tameness of German 



136 The Crimes of England 

practice. The Germans sterilise thought, 
making it active with a wild virginity ; which 
can bear no fruit. 

But though there are so many mad theo- 
ries, most of them have one root; and de- 
pend upon one assumption. It matters little 
whether we call it, with the German Social- 
ists, "the Materialist Theory of History"; 
or, with Bismarck, "blood and iron/' It can 
be put most fairly thus: that all important 
events of history are biological, like a change 
of pasture or the communism of a pack of 
wolves. Professors are still tearing their 
hair in the effort to prove somehow that the 
Crusaders were migrating for food like 
swallows ; or that the French Revolutionists 
were somehow only swarming like bees. 
This works in two ways often accounted op- 
posite ; and explains both the German Social- 
ist and the Junker. For, first, it fits in with 
Teutonic Imperialism; making the "blonde 
beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature 
it is to eat such lambs as the French. The 
highest success of this notion in Europe is 
marked by praise given to a race famous for 
its physical firmness and fighting breed, but 
which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pre- 



The Wrong Horse 137 

tended to rule ; the Turk, whom some Tories 
called "the gentleman of Europe." The 
Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his 
way to patronise the Cross. It was corpor- 
ately embodied when Greece attempted a 
solitary adventure against Turkey and was 
quickly crushed. That English guns helped 
to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the 
Concert upon Crete, cannot be left out of 
mind while we are making appeals to Greece 
— or considering the crimes of England. 

But the same principle serves to keep the 
internal politics of the Germans quiet, and 
prevent Socialism being the practical hope or 
peril it has been in so many other countries. 
It operates in two ways ; first, by a curious 
fallacy about "the time not being ripe ,, — as 
if time could ever be ripe. The same sav- 
age superstition from the forests had in- 
fected Matthew Arnold pretty badly when 
he made a personality out of the Zeitgeist — 
perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely 
fabulous. It is tricked by a biological paral- 
lel, by which the chicken always comes out 
of the egg "at the right time." He does not ; 
he comes out when he comes out. The 
Marxian Socialist will not strike till the 



138 The Crimes of England 

clock strikes ; and the clock is made in Ger- 
many, and never strikes. Moreover, the 
theory of all history as a search for food 
makes the masses content with having food 
and physic, but not freedom. The best 
working model in the matter is the system 
of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total 
failure and dead letter in France but has 
been, in the German sense, a great success 
in Germany. It treats employed persons as 
a fixed, separate, and lower caste, who must 
not themselves dispose of the margin of their 
small wages. In 191 1 it was introduced into 
England by Mr. Lloyd George, who had 
studied its operations in Germany, and, by 
the Prussian prestige in "social reform/' 
was passed. 

These three tendencies cohere, or are co- 
hering, in an institution which is not with- 
out a great historical basis and not without 
great modern conveniences. And as France 
was the standard-bearer of citizenship in 
1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this 
alternative solution in 191 5. The institution 
which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, 
or rather logically flows from, all the three 
spirits of which I have spoken, and prom- 



The Wrong Horse 139 

ises great advantages to each of them. It 
can give the individual worker everything 
except the power to alter the State — that is, 
his own status. Finality (or what certain 
eleutheromaniacs would call hopelessness) 
of status is the soul of Slavery — and of 
Compulsory Insurance. Then again, Ger- 
many gives the individual exactly the liberty 
that has always been given to a slave — the 
liberty to think, the liberty to dream, the lib- 
erty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any 
intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable 
world and state — such as have always been 
free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of 
Epictetus to the skylarking fairy tales of 
Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged 
by all defenders of slavery that, if history 
has merely a material test, the material con- 
dition of the subordinate under slavery 
tends to be good rather than bad. When I 
once pointed out how precisely the "model 
village'' of a great employer reproduces the 
safety and seclusion of an old slave estate, 
the employer thought it quite enough to an- 
swer indignantly that he had provided baths, 
playing-grounds, a theatre, etc., for his 
workers. He would probably have thought 



140 The Crimes of England 

it odd to hear a planter in South Carolina 
boast that he had provided banjos, hymn- 
books, and places suitable for the cake-walk. 
Yet the planter must have provided the ban- 
jos, for a slave cannot own property. And if 
this Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail 
among us, I think some of the broad-minded 
thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe 
something like an apology to many gallant 
gentlemen whose graves lie where the last 
battle was fought in the Wilderness; men 
who had the courage to fight for it, the cour- 
age to die for it and, above all, the courage 
to call it by its name. 

With the acceptance by England of the 
German Insurance Act, I bring this sketch 
of the past relations of the two countries to 
an end. I have written this book because I 
wish, once and for all, to be done with my 
friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who 
has long despaired of really defending his 
own country, and has fallen back upon abus- 
ing mine. He has dropped, amid general 
derision, his attempt to call a thing right 
when even the Chancellor who did it called 
it wrong. But he has an idea that if he can 
show that somebody from England some- 



The Wrong Horse 141 

where did another wrong, the two wrongs 
may make a right. Against the cry of the 
Roman Catholic Poles the Prussian has 
never done, or even pretended to do, any- 
thing but harden his heart; but he has (such 
are the lovable inconsistencies of human na- 
ture) a warm corner in his heart for the 
Roman Catholic Irish. He has not a word 
to say for himself about the campaign in 
Belgium, but he still has many wise, re- 
proachful words to utter about the campaign 
in South Africa. I propose to take those 
words out of his mouth. I will have nothing 
to do with the fatuous front-bench preten- 
sions that our governors always govern well, 
that our statesmen are never whitewashed 
and never in need of whitewash. The only 
moral superiority I claim is that of not de- 
fending the indefensible. I most earnestly 
urge my countrymen not to hide behind thin 
official excuses, which the sister kingdoms 
and the subject races can easily see through. 
We can confess that our crimes have been as 
mountains, and still not be afraid of the 
present comparison. There may be, in the 
eyes of some, a risk in dwelling in this dark 
hour on our failures in the past: I believe 



142 The Crimes of England 

profoundly that the risk is all the other way. 
I believe that the most deadly danger to our 
arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self- 
praise, any flavour of that moral cowardice, 
any glimpse of that impudent and ultimate 
impenitence, that may make one Boer or 
Scot or Welshman or Irishman or Indian 
feel that he is only smoothing the path for 
a second Prussia. I have passed the great 
part of my life in criticising and condemning 
the existing rulers and institutions of my 
country: I think it is infinitely the most pa- 
triotic thing that a man can do. I have no il- 
lusions either about our past or our pres- 
ent. I think our whole history in Ireland has 
been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the 
crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think 
the South African War was a dirty work 
which we did under the whips of money- 
lenders. I think Mitchelstown was a dis- 
grace ; I think Denshawi was a devilry. 

Yet there is one part of life and history in 
which I would assert the absolute spotless- 
ness of England. In one department we 
wear a robe of white and a halo of inno- 
cence. Long and weary as may be the rec- 
ords of our wickedness, in one direction we 



The Wrong Horse 143 

have done nothing but good. Whoever we 
may have wronged, we have never wronged 
Germany. Again and again we have 
dragged her from under the just vengeance 
of her enemies, from the holy anger of Ma- 
ria Teresa, from the impatient and con- 
temptuous common sense of Napoleon. We 
have kept a ring fence around the Germans 
while they sacked Denmark and dismem- 
bered France. And if we had served our 
God as we have served their kings, there 
would not be to-day one remnant of them in 
our path, either to slander or to slay us. 



IX — The Awakening of England 

IN October 1912 silent and seemingly 
uninhabited crags and chasms in the 
high western region of the Balkans 
echoed and re-echoed with a single 
shot. It was fired by the hand of a king — 
a real king, who sat listening to his people in 
front of his own house ( for it was hardly a 
palace), and who, in consequence of his lis- 
tening to the people, not un frequently im- 
prisoned the politicians. It is said of him 
that his great respect for Gladstone as the 
western advocate of Balkan freedom was 
slightly shadowed by the fact that Gladstone 
did not succeed in effecting the bodily cap- 
ture of Jack the Ripper. This simple mon- 
arch knew that if a malefactor were the ter- 
ror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects 
would expect him personally to take arms 
and pursue the ruffian; and if he refused to 
do so, would very probably experiment with 
another king. And the same primitive con- 
ception of a king being kept for some kind 
of purpose, led them also to expect him to 

145 



146 The Crimes of England 

lead in a foreign campaign, and it was with 
his own hand that he fired the first shot of 
the war which brought down into the dust 
the ancient empire of the Grand Turk. 

His kingdom was little more than the 
black mountain after which it was named: 
we commonly refer to it under its Italian 
translation of Montenegro. It is worth 
while to pause for a moment upon his pic- 
turesque and peculiar community, because it 
is perhaps the simplest working model of 
all that stood in the path of the great Ger- 
manic social machine I have described in the 
last chapter — stood in its path and was soon 
to be very nearly destroyed by its onset. It 
was a branch of the Serbian stock which had 
climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie, 
and thence, for many hundred years, had 
mocked at the predatory empire of the 
Turks. The Serbians in their turn were but 
one branch of the peasant Slavs, millions of 
whom are spread over Russia and subject on 
many sides to empires with which they have 
less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the 
broad features which are important here, 
are not merely Slavonic but simply Euro- 
pean. But a particular picture is generally 



The Awakening of England 147 

more pointed and intelligible than tenden- 
cies which elsewhere are mingled with sub- 
tler tendencies; and of this unmixed Euro- 
pean simplicity Montenegro is an excellent 
model. 

Moreover, the instance of one small Chris- 
tian State will serve to emphasise that this 
is not a quarrel between England and Ger- 
many, but between Europe and Germany. 
It is my whole purpose in these pages not 
to spare my own country where it is open to 
criticism; and I freely admit that Montene- 
gro, morally and politically speaking, is al- 
most as much in advance of England as it is 
of Germany. In Montenegro there are no 
millionaires — and therefore next to no So- 
cialists. As to why there are no million- 
aires, it is a mystery, and best studied 
among the mysteries of the Middle Ages. 
By some of the dark ingenuities of that age 
of priestcraft a curious thing was discov- 
ered — that if you kill every usurer, every 
forestaller, every adulterater, every user of 
false weights, every fixer of false bound- 
aries, every land-thief, every water-thief, 
you afterwards discover by a strange indi- 
rect miracle, or disconnected truth from 



148 The Crimes of England 

heaven, that you have no millionaires. 
Without dwelling further on this dark mat- 
ter, we may say that this great gap in the 
Montenegrin experience explains the other 
great gap — the lack of Socialists. The 
Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is 
curiously absent from this land. The reason 
(I have sometimes fancied) is that the Pro- 
letarian is class-conscious, not because he is 
a Proletarian of All Lands, but because he 
is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor 
people in Montenegro have lands — not land- 
lords. They have roots; for the peasant is 
the root of the priest, the poet, and the war- 
rior. And this, and not a mere recrimina- 
tion about acts of violence, is the ground of 
the age-long Balkan bitterness against the 
Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins are pa- 
triotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not 
patriotic for Turkey. They never heard of 
it, in fact. They are Bedouins, as homeless 
as the desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord 
Salisbury was an Arab steed, only stabled 
in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule 
vagabond people, like the gypsies. To be 
ruled by them is impossible. 

Nevertheless what was called the nine- 



The Awakening of England 149 

teenth century, and named with a sort of 
transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean 
worship of number), was wearing to its 
close with reaction everywhere, and the 
Turk, the great type of reaction, stronger 
than ever in the saddle. The most civilised 
of the Christian nations overshadowed by 
the Crescent dared to attack it and was over- 
whelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as un- 
answerable as Hittin. In England Glad- 
stone and Gladstonism were dead; and Mr. 
Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expend- 
ing a type of praise upon the British Army 
which would have been even more appropri- 
ate to the Prussian Army. The Prussian 
Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Ger- 
many; Germany ruled the Concert of 
Europe. She was planting everywhere the 
appliances of that new servile machinery 
which was her secret; the absolute identifi- 
cation of national subordination with busi- 
ness employment ; so that Krupp could count 
on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp. Every 
other commercial traveller was pathetically 
proud of being both a slave and a spy. The 
old and the new tyrants had taken hands. 
The "sack" of the boss was as silent and 



150 The Crimes of England 

fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And the 
dream of the citizen was at an end. 

It was under a sky so leaden and on a 
road so strewn with bones that the little 
mountain democracy with its patriarchal 
prince went out, first and before all its 
friends, on the last and seemingly the most 
hopeless of the rebellions against the Otto- 
man Empire. Only one of the omens seemed 
other than disastrous; and even that was 
doubtful. For the successful Mediterranean 
attack on Tripoli while proving the gallan- 
try of the Italians (if that ever needed prov- 
ing) could be taken in two ways, and was 
seen by many, and probably most, sincere 
liberals as a mere extension of the Imperial- 
ist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and 
not as the promise of newer things. Italy, 
it must be remembered, was still supposed to 
be the partner of Prussia and the Haps- 
burgs. For days that seemed like months 
the microscopic state seemed to be attempt- 
ing alone what the Crusades had failed to 
accomplish. And for days Europe and the 
great powers were thunderstruck, again and 
yet again, by the news of Turkish forts fall- 
ing, Turkish cohorts collapsing, the uncon- 



The Awakening of England 151 

querable Crescent going down in blood. The 
Serbians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks had 
gathered and risen from their lairs; and men 
knew that these peasants had done what all 
the politicians had long despaired of doing, 
and that the spirit of the first Christian Em- 
peror was already standing over the city that 
is named after his name. 

For Germany this quite unexpected rush 
was a reversal of the whole tide of the world. 
It was as if the Rhine itself had returned 
from the ocean and retired into the Alps. 
For a long time past every important polit- 
ical process in Europe had been produced 
or permitted by Prussia. She had pulled 
down ministers in France and arrested re- 
forms in Russia. Her ruler was acclaimed 
by Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans 
like Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age. 
One of the most famous and brilliant of our 
journalists called him "the Lord Chief Jus- 
tice of Europe." He was the strongest man 
in Christendom; and he had confirmed and 
consecrated the Crescent. And when he had 
consecrated it a few hill tribes had risen and 
trampled it like mire. One or two other 
things about the same time, less important in 



152 The Crimes of England 

themselves, struck in the Prussian's ear the 
same new note of warning and doubt. He 
sought to obtain a small advantage on the 
north-west coast of Africa; and England 
seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in 
insisting on its abandonment. In the coun- 
cils over Morocco, England agreed with 
France with what did not seem altogether an 
accidental agreement. But we shall not be 
wrong if we put the crucial point of the Ger- 
man surprise and anger at the attack from 
the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not 
only did it menace the key of Asia and the 
whole Eastern dream of German commerce ; 
not only did it offer the picture of one army 
trained by France and victorious, and an- 
other army trained by Germany and beaten. 
There was more than the material victory of 
the Creusot over the Krupp gun. It was 
also the victory of the peasant's field over 
the Krupp factory. By this time there was 
in the North German brain an awful inver- 
sion of all the legends and heroic lives that 
the human race has loved. Prussia hated 
romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neg- 
lected ; it was a thing that tormented her as 
any bully is tormented by an unanswered 



The Awakening of England 153 

challenge. That weird process was com- 
pleted of which I have spoken on an earlier 
page, whereby the soul of this strange peo- 
ple was everywhere on the side of the dragon 
against the knight, of the giant against the 
hero. Anything unexpected — the forlorn 
hopes, the eleventh-hour inspirations, by 
which the weak can elude the strong, and 
which take the hearts of happier men like 
trumpets — rilled the Prussian with a cold 
fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian 
felt as a Chicago pork butcher would feel if 
the pigs not only refused to pass through his 
machine, but turned into romantic wild 
boars, raging and rending, calling for the 
old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests 
of kings. 

The Prussian saw these things and his 
mind was made up. He was silent; but he 
laboured: laboured for three long years 
without intermission at the making of a mili- 
tary machine that should cut out of the 
world for ever such romantic accident or 
random adventure; a machine that should 
cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion 
that they had wings. That he did so plot 
and prepare for an attack that should come 



154 The Crimes of England 

from him, anticipating and overwhelming 
any resistance, is now, even in the documents 
he has himself published, a fact of common 
sense. Suppose a man sells all his lands ex- 
cept a small yard containing a well ; suppose 
in the division of the effects of an old friend 
he particularly asks for his razors; suppose 
when a corded trunk is sent him he sends 
back the trunk, but keeps the cord. And then 
suppose we hear that a rival of his has been 
lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, ap- 
parently with a razor, and his body hidden 
in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes 
to project a preliminary suspicion about the 
guilty party. In the discussions held by the 
Prussian Government with Lord Haldane 
and Sir Edward Grey we can now see quite 
as plainly the meaning of the things that 
were granted and the things that were with- 
held, the things that would have satisfied the 
Prussian plotter and the things that did not 
satisfy him. The German Chancellor re- 
fused an English promise not to be aggres- 
sive and asked instead for an English prom- 
ise to be neutral. There is no meaning in 
the distinction, except in the mind of an ag- 
gressor. Germany proposed a pacific ar- 



The Awakening of England 155 

rangement which forbade England to form 
a righting alliance with France, but permit- 
ted Germany to retain her old righting alli- 
ance with Austria. When the hour of war 
came she used Austria, used the old fighting 
alliance and tried to use the new idea of 
English neutrality. That is to say, she used 
the rope, the razor, and the well. 

But it was either by accident or by indi- 
vidual diplomatic skill that England at the 
end of the three years even had her own 
hands free to help in frustrating the Ger- 
man plot. The mass of the English people 
had no notion of such a plot; and indeed re- 
garded the occasional suggestion of it as 
absurd. Nor did even the people who knew 
best know very much better. Thanks and 
even apologies are doubtless due to those 
who in the deepest lull of our sleeping part- 
nership with Prussia saw her not as a part- 
ner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. 
Blatchford, Mr. Bart Kennedy, or the late 
Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be 
made. Few even of these, with the admir- 
able and indeed almost magical exception of 
Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; oc- 
cupied mainly with Europe and only inci- 



156 The Crimes of England 

dentally with England; indeed, in the first 
stages, not occupied with England at all. 
Even the Anti-Germans were too insular. 
Even those who saw most of Germany's plan 
saw too much of England's part in it. They 
saw it almost wholly as a commercial and 
colonial quarrel ; and saw its issue under the 
image of an invasion of England, which is 
even now not very probable. This fear of 
Germany was indeed a very German fear of 
Germany. This also conceived the English 
as Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as 
at war with something like itself — practical, 
prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, 
prepared to cut us up in battle as she cut us 
out in business. The time of our larger vi- 
sion was not yet, when we should realise 
that Germany was more deeply at war with 
things quite unlike herself, things from 
which we also had sadly strayed. Then we 
should remember what we were and see 
whence we also had come ; and far and high 
upon that mountain from which the Crescent 
was cast down, behold what was everywhere 
the real enemy of the Iron Cross — the peas- 
ant's cross, which is of wood. 

Even our very slight ripples of panic, 



The Awakening of England 157 

therefore, were provincial, and even shal- 
low; and for the most part we were pos- 
sessed and convinced of peace. That peace 
was not a noble one. We had indeed 
reached one of the lowest and flattest levels 
of all our undulating history; and it must 
be admitted that the contemptuous calcula- 
tion with which Germany counted on our 
submission and abstention was not alto- 
gether unfounded, though it was, thank God, 
unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alli- 
ances against freedom had come. The meek 
acceptance of Kultur in our books and 
schools had stiffened what was once a free 
country with a German formalism and a 
German fear. By a queer irony, even the 
same popular writer who had already 
warned us against the Prussians, had sought 
to preach among the populace a very Prus- 
sian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance 
of the charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of 
the two great parties had long slackened into 
an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, 
and a pretence was still made that no pact 
existed beyond a common patriotism. But 
the pretence failed altogether ; for it was evi- 
dent that the leaders on either side, so far 



158 The Crimes of England 

from leading in divergent directions, were 
much closer to each other than to their own 
followers. The power of these leaders had 
enormously increased; but the distance be- 
tween them had diminished, or, rather, dis- 
appeared. It was said about 1800, in deri- 
sion of the Foxite rump, that the Whig 
Party came down to Parliament in a four- 
wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900 
that the Whig Party and the Tory Party 
came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It 
was not a case of two towers rising into dif- 
ferent roofs or spires, but founded in the 
same soil. It was rather the case of an arch, 
of which the foundation-stones on either 
side might fancy they were two buildings; 
but the stones nearest the keystone would 
know there was only one. This "two-handed 
engine" still stood ready to strike, not, in- 
deed, the other part of itself, but anyone 
who ventured to deny that it was doing so. 
We were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland 
king and queen, who cut off our heads, not 
for saying they quarrelled but for saying 
they didn't. The libel law was now used, not 
to crush lies about private life, but to crush 
truths about public life. Representation had 



The Awakening of England 159 

become mere misrepresentation; a maze of 
loopholes. This was mainly due to the mon- 
strous presence of certain secret moneys, on 
which alone many men could win the ruinous 
elections of the age, and which were con- 
tributed and distributed with less check or 
record than is tolerated in the lowest trade 
or club. Only one or two people attacked 
these funds; nobody defended them. 
Through them the great capitalists had the 
handle of politics, as of everything else. The 
poor were struggling hopelessly against ris- 
ing prices; and their attempts at collective 
bargaining, by the collective refusal of bad- 
ly-paid work, were discussed in the press, 
Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State. 
And so they were ; upon the Servile State. 

Such was the condition of England in 
1914, when Prussia, now at last armed to the 
teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before 
the world, and solemnly, like one taking a 
sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a 
crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one 
which she had herself forbidden — marching 
upon France through neutralised Belgium, 
where every step was on her broken word. 
Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as in- 



160 The Crimes of England 

deed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. 
Instantly the whole invasion was lit up with 
a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the 
watching nations white who had never 
known the Prussian. The statistics of non- 
combatants killed and tortured by this time 
only stun the imagination. But two friends 
of my own have been in villages sacked by 
the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle 
containing the Sacrament patiently picked 
out in pattern by shot after shot. The other 
saw a rocking-horse and the wooden toys in 
a nursery laboriously hacked to pieces. 
Those two facts together will be enough to 
satisfy some of us of the name of the Spirit 
that had passed. 

And then a strange thing happened. Eng- 
land, that had not in the modern sense any 
army at all, was justified of all her children. 
Respected institutions and reputations did 
indeed waver and collapse on many sides: 
though the chief of the states replied worth- 
ily to a bribe from the foreign bully, many 
other politicians were sufficiently wild and 
weak, though doubtless patriotic in inten- 
tion. One was set to restrain the journal- 
ists, and had to be restrained himself, for 



The Awakening of England 161 

being more sensational than any of them. 
Another scolded the working-classes in the 
style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. 
But England was saved by a forgotten thing 
— the English. Simple men with simple mo- 
tives, the chief one a hate of injustice which! 
grows simpler the longer we stare at it, came 
out of their dreary tenements and their tidy 
shops, their fields and their suburbs and 
their factories and their rookeries, and asked 
for the arms of men. In a throng that was 
at last three million men, the islanders went 
forth from their island, as simply as the 
mountaineers had gone forth from their 
mountain, with their faces to the dawn* 



X.—The Battle of the Marne 

THE impression produced by the 
first week of war was that the 
British contingent had come just 
in time for the end of the world. 
Or rather, for any sensitive and civilised 
man, touched by the modern doubt but by the 
equally modern mysticism, that old theo- 
cratic vision fell far short of the sickening 
terror of the time. For it was a day of 
judgment in which upon the throne in heaven 
and above the cherubim, sat not God, but 
another. 

The British had been posted at the ex- 
treme western end of the allied line in the 
north. The other end rested on the secure 
city and fortress of Namur ; their end rested 
upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental 
fancy to say that there was something for- 
lorn in the position of that loose end in a 
strange land, with only the sad fields of 
Northern France between them and the sea. 
For it was really round that loose end that 

the foe would probably fling the lasso of his 
163 



164 The Crimes of England 

charge; it was here that death might soon 
be present upon every side. It must be re- 
membered that many critics, including many 
Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not 
eaten into this as into other parts of the na- 
tional life, feared that England had too long 
neglected both the ethic and the technique 
of war, and would prove a weak link in the 
chain. The enemy was absolutely certain 
that it was so. To these men, standing dis- 
consolately amid the hedgeless plains and 
poplars, came the news that Namur was 
gone, which was to their captains one of 
the four corners of the earth. The two 
armies had touched; and instantly the 
weaker took an electric shock which told of 
electric energy, deep into deep Germany, bat- 
tery behind battery of abysmal force. In the 
instant it was discovered that the enemy was 
more numerous than they had dreamed. He 
was actually more numerous even than they 
discovered. Every oncoming horseman 
doubled as in a drunkard's vision ; and they 
were soon striving without speech in a night- 
mare of numbers. Then all the allied forces 
at the front were overthrown in the tragic 
battle of Mons ; and began that black retreat, 



The Battle of the Marne 165 



in which so many of our young men knew 
war first and at its worst in this terrible 
world ; and so many never returned. 

In that blackness began to grow strange 
emotions, long unfamiliar to our blood. 
Those six dark days are as full of legends as 
the six centuries of the Dark Ages. Many 
of these may be exaggerated fancies, one 
was certainly an avowed fiction, others are 
quite different from it and more difficult to 
dissipate into the daylight. But one curious 
fact remains about them if they were all lies, 
or even if they were all deliberate works of 
art. Not one of them referred to those close, 
crowded, and stirring three centuries which 
are nearest to us, and which alone are cov- 
ered in this sketch, the centuries during 
which the Teutonic influence had expanded 
itself over our islands. Ghosts were there 
perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgot- 
ten ancestors. Nobody saw Cromwell or 
even Wellington ; nobody so much as thought 
about Cecil Rhodes. Things were either 
seen or said among the British which linked 
them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, 
with the French, who spoke of Joan of Arc 
in heaven above the fated city; or the Rus- 



166 The Crimes of England 

sians who dreamed of the Mother of God 
with her hand pointing to the west. They 
were the visions or the inventions of a me- 
diaeval army; and a prose poet was in line 
with many popular rumours when he told of 
ghostly archers crying "Array, Array/' as in 
that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I 
have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow. 
Other tales, true or only symptomatic, told 
of one on a great white horse who was not 
the victor of Blenheim or even the Black 
Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off mar- 
tyrologies — St. George. One soldier is as- 
serted to have claimed to identify the saint 
because he was "on every quid." On the 
coins, St. George is a Roman soldier. 

But these fancies, if they were fancies, 
might well seem the last sickly flickerings 
of an old-world order now finally wounded 
to the death. That which was coming on, 
with the whole weight of a new world, was 
something that had never been numbered 
among the Seven Champions of Christen- 
dom. Now, in more doubtful and more hope- 
ful days, it is almost impossible to repicture 
what was, for those who understood, the gi- 
gantic finality of the first German strides. 



The. Battle of the Marne 167 

It seemed as if the forces of the ancient val- 
our fell away to right and left; and there 
opened a grand, smooth granite road right 
to the gate of Paris, down which the great 
Germania moved like a tall, unanswerable 
sphinx, whose pride could destroy all things 
and survive them. In her train moved, like 
moving mountains, Cyclopean guns that had 
never been seen among men, before which 
walled cities melted like wax, their mouths 
set insolently upwards as if threatening to 
besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak 
so of the new and abnormal armaments ; for 
the soul of Germany was really expressed 
in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her 
guns were more symbolic than her flags. 
Then and now, and in every place and time, 
it is to be noted that the German superiority 
has been in a certain thing and of a certain 
kind. It is not unity ; it is not, in the moral 
sense, discipline. Nothing can be more 
united in a moral sense than a French, Brit- 
ish, or Russian regiment. Nothing, for that 
matter, could be more united than a High- 
land clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of relig- 
ious fanatics in the Soudan. What such en- 
gines, in such size and multiplicity, really 



168 The Crimes of England 

meant was this: they meant a type of life 
naturally intolerable to happier and more 
healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger 
scale and consuming larger populations than 
had ever been known before. They meant 
cities growing larger than provinces, fac- 
tories growing larger than cities ; they meant 
the empire of the slum. They meant a de- 
gree of detailed repetition and dehumanised 
division of labour, to which no man born 
would surrender his brief span in the sun- 
shine, if he could hope to beat his plough- 
share into a sword. The nations of the 
earth were not to surrender to the Kaiser; 
they were to surrender to Krupp, his master 
and theirs ; the French, the British, the Rus- 
sians were to surrender to Krupp as the 
Germans themselves, after a few swiftly 
broken strikes, had already surrendered to 
Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that 
incomparable machinery, through every link 
in that iron and unending chain, ran the 
mastery and the skill of a certain kind of 
artist ; an artist whose hands are never idle 
through dreaming or drawn back in disgust 
or lifted in wonder or in wrath ; but sure and 
tireless in their touch upon the thousand 



M 



The Battle of the Marne 169 

little things that make the invisible machin- 
ery of life. That artist was there in tri- 
umph; but he had no name. The ancient 
world called him the Slave. 

From this advancing machine of millions, 
the slighter array of the Allies, and espe- 
cially the British at their ultimate outpost, 
saved themselves by a succession of hair's- 
breadth escapes and what must have seemed 
to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a 
mouse before a cat. Again and again Von 
Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and 
infantry, clawed round the end of the Brit- 
ish force, which eluded it as by leaping back 
again and again. Sometimes the pursuer 
was, so to speak, so much on top of his prey 
that it could not even give way to him ; but 
had to hit such blows as it could in the hope 
of checking him for the instant needed for 
escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was 
so close that a small individual accident, the 
capture of one man, would mean the wash- 
ing out of a whole battalion. For day after 
day this living death endured. And day af- 
ter day a certain dark truth began to be re- 
vealed, bit by bit, certainly to the incredu- 
lous wonder of the Prussians, quite possibly 



170 The Crimes of England 

to the surprise of the French, and quite as 
possibly to the surprise of themselves; that 
there was something singular about the 
British soldiers. That singular thing may 
be expressed in a variety of ways; but it 
would be almost certainly expressed insuffi- 
ciently by anyone who had not had the moral 
courage to face the facts about his country 
in the last decades before the war. It may 
perhaps be best expressed by saying that 
some thousands of Englishmen were dead: 
and that England was not. 

The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so 
to speak, offering a refuge for the unresting 
and tormented retreat; the British Generals 
had refused it and continued to fight a losing 
fight in the open for the sake of the common 
plan. At night an enormous multitude of 
Germans had come unexpectedly through 
the forest and caught a smaller body of the 
British in Landrecies; failed to dislodge 
them and lost a whole battalion in that battle 
of the darkness. At the extreme end of the 
line Smith-Dorrien's division, who seemed 
to be nearly caught or cut off, had fought 
with one gun against four, and so hammered 
the Germans that they were forced to let go 



The Battle of the Marne 171 

their hold; and the British were again free. 
When the blowing up of a bridge announced 
that they had crossed the last river, some- 
thing other than that battered remnant was 
saved; it was the honour of the thing by 
which we live. 

The driven and defeated line stood at last 
almost under the walls of Paris; and the 
world waited for the doom of the city. The 
gates seemed to stand open; and the Prus- 
sian was to ride into it for the third and the 
last time: for the end of its long epic of lib- 
erty and equality was come. And still the 
very able and very French individual on 
whom rested the last hope of the seemingly 
hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a rock, 
in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his 
bulldog figure. He had called his bewildered 
soldiers back when they had broken the inva- 
sion at Guise ; he had silently digested the re- 
sponsibility of dragging on the retreat, as in 
despair, to the last desperate leagues before 
the capital ; and he stood and watched. And 
even as he watched the whole huge invasion 
swerved. 

Out through Paris and out and around be- 
yond Paris, other men in dim blue coats 



172 The Crimes of England 

swung out in long lines upon the plain, 
slowly folding upon Von Kluck like blue 
wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and 
then, flinging a few secondary forces to de- 
lay the wing that was swinging round on 
him, dashed across the Allies' line at a des- 
perate angle, to smash it in the centre as with 
a hammer. It was less desperate than it 
seemed; for he counted, and might well 
count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy 
of the British line and the end of the French 
line immediately in front of him, which for 
six days and nights he had chased before 
him like autumn leaves before a whirlwind. 
Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained, dust- 
hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept 
into a corner. But even as their conquerors 
wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the 
charge; and the English went forward 
through the wood that is called Cregy, and 
stamped it with their seal for the second 
time, in the highest moment of all the secu- 
lar history of man. 

But it was not now the Cregy in which 
English and French knights had met in a 
more coloured age, in a battle that was 
rather a tournament. It was a league of all 



The Battle of the Marne 173 



knights for the remains of all knighthood, 
of all brotherhood in arms or in arts, against 
that which is and has been radically un- &** 
knightly and radically unbrotherly from the 
beginning. Much was to happen after — 
murder and flaming folly and madness in 
earth and sea and sky; but all men knew vtnf, 
in their hearts that the third Prussian thrust 
had failed, and Christendom was delivered 
once more. The empire of blood and iron 
rolled slowly back towards the darkness of 
the northern forests; and the great nations 
of the West went forward; where side by 
side as after a long lover's quarrel, went the 
ensigns of St. Denys and St. George. 



NOTE ON THE WORD "ENGLISH" 

The zvords "England" and "English" as used here 
require a word of explanation, if only to anticipate 
the ire of the inevitable Scot. To begin with, the 
word "British" involves a similar awkwardness. I 
have tried to use it in the one or two cases that re- 
ferred to such things as military glory and unity: 
though I am sure I have failed of full consistency 
in so complex a matter. The difficulty is that this 
sense of glory and unity, which should certainly 
cover the Scotch, should also cover the Irish. And 
while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman a North 
Briton (despite the just protest of Stevenson) , it is 
very unsafe indeed to call an Irishman a West 
Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I can as- 
sure the Scot that I say "England," not because I 
deny Scottish nationality, but because I affirm it. 
And I can say, further, that I could not here include 
Scots in the thesis, simply because I could not in- 
clude them in the condemnation. This book is a 
study, not of a disease but rather of a weakness, 
which has only been predominant in the predominant 
partner: It would not be true, for instance, to say 
either of Ireland or Scotland that the populace 
lacked a religion; but I do think that British policy 
as a whole has suffered from the English lack of 
one, with its inevitable result of plutocracy and 
class contempt 



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